Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  “Fine. Then drive to the Newark airport and leave the car in the long-term parking lot.”

  “Okay, Mr. Rizza. He’ll be plenty ripe by the time they find him.”

  Both Sal and his companion, whose name Frank had heard but simply couldn’t remember, thought this was very funny. The New Jersey families were full of such animals.

  “You drive. You can drop me off right here.”

  Frank stayed long enough to watch them pull Freddie Ju out by his arms and then hoist him into the trunk, then he left. He was staying at the Trump, which was only five blocks away, and he could use the fresh air.

  Not that he had any complaints. It was a good clean job and reasonably cheap. He had set up the hit himself and then paid Ed Quong $5,000 for a throw-away hitter—he had the impression that Quong, for reasons best known to himself, was more than happy to burn Freddie and might have taken less, but Frank didn’t want to turn it into a question of prestige. The Chinese were funny about stuff like that.

  The two goons who were presently on their way to Newark were on loan from Al DeCosta, who owed him a favor and was in control of Atlantic City, at least until the next car bombing.

  So even after expenses there was a good ten or twelve thousand left over from the money the Preston bitch had given him for this job.

  Frank had thought it over carefully and had decided to turn the rest of the wad over to Al. Al had good connections as far north as Boston. You never knew—he even might be able to find out what a country cop like this Cheffins had done to piss off a fine lady like Miss Alicia Preston.

  And if he could find that out, maybe Frank could finally get her hooks out of him.

  22

  Warren Pratt took a cab straight from La Guardia Airport to Grand Central, where he caught the commuter train to New Gilead. He hadn’t been on the ground more than two hours before he was standing in front of Jim Kinkaid’s front door, which the housekeeper opened with apparent reluctance.

  “Mr. Kinkaid isn’t at home,” she said, her thin face just visible behind the chain lock. “He’s gone to a funeral.”

  “Is he out of town?”

  “Mercy no!”

  “Then where is it being held? The funeral, I mean.”

  “At the Second Congregational Church—just up the street,” she added quickly, as if fending off a dangerous line of inquiry.

  “Then I’ll look for him there. Do you think it would be all right if I left my bag here?”

  They both glanced down at the scuffed brown suitcase brushing against Pratt’s trouser leg.

  “Will you be staying?”

  Julia—that was her name, he finally remembered—Julia looked as if she dreaded to hear the answer.

  “That’s up to Mr, Kinkaid. By the way, who died?”

  “The marshal.”

  With that she closed the door in his face. He waited a few seconds, if only to see if she would reopen it, but when she didn’t he started back down the walkway. About thirty feet down the sidewalk he turned around just in time to see his suitcase disappearing into the house.

  The Second Congregational Church (Gathered in 1832), was a wooden building painted glaringly white. The steeple rose like a needle over the front doors, which were standing open. Organ music percolated out onto the street, where only a few cars were parked. One of these Pratt recognized as Kinkaid’s Mercedes.

  Inside, the sanctuary was remarkably gloomy. The windows, of plain glass, were about twenty feet up on the walls and seemed to admit no useful light. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Pratt could make out the casket, a large bronze affair, just this side of the altar rail, and the fact that the mourners seemed to consist of half a dozen uniformed policemen and only three men in civilian clothes, of whom Kinkaid was the one seated in the third pew back, on the left side.

  Pratt went up and sat down beside him.

  “The guy must not have had too many friends.”

  Kinkaid turned his head slightly and looked for just a moment as if he were about to utter a rebuke, but then he seemed to think better of it.

  “The newspapers have been full of dark hints that he was crooked,” he murmured. “He was shot to death last Tuesday evening.”

  “So the good citizens are staying away?” Pratt nodded, as if the scenario was perfectly familiar to him. “Where did it happen?”

  Kinkaid raised his eyebrows slightly, which was probably intended to suggest that he found the question not unintelligent.

  “At home. They phoned his house at ten o’clock Wednesday morning, when he didn’t show up for work. Then they sent a deputy around. He noticed that the marshal’s car was still in the garage, and when he went over to investigate he found the body. He’d been shot six times, including a coup de grâce to the head.”

  “What caliber?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Very professional. What was the time of death?”

  “The coroner hasn’t taken me into his confidence, but it must have been between five and eight in the evening—he missed his poker game that night. He was still in uniform, so I think he was probably killed as soon as he got home from work.”

  “Was he crooked?”

  Kinkaid hesitated for just an instant, and thus even against his will revealed that he was privy to facts about the late marshal which he was not prepared to make known.

  “Cheffins held an appointive office,” he said finally. “And he had held that office for a long time. Let’s just say that he understood the limits of his authority.”

  Then he shook his head.

  “But, no, he wasn’t crooked in the way the newspapers have been suggesting. This is a small town, Warren. And in small towns the local lawyer gets to be something of an authority on local scandal. If Bill Cheffins had been dabbling in narcotics, I think I would have heard something.”

  “Was he your client?”

  “No.”

  So who are you protecting? Pratt wondered. Then it occurred to him that this was probably the first time Kinkaid had ever called him by his first name.

  The sermon was about fifteen minutes long but seemed much longer. Its one point of interest was the scrupulousness with which it avoided even the most passing reference to the deceased, as if that subject were even more painful than death itself. Clearly Marshal Cheffins’ spiritual shepherd had been reading the crime pages.

  When the funeral service was over, they went back outside into the sunlight. Across the street a smallish, Mediterranean-looking type in a dark suit was leaning against a shiny blue Ford, obviously a rental, and Pratt thought for a moment he might be some local hood come to pay his respects, but he didn’t join the funeral cortege so apparently he was just a curious tourist.

  Everybody else got into their cars and followed the hearse to a cemetery about twenty minutes outside of town. As always, Pratt found the graveside rituals at once ludicrous and depressing. He was glad when it was all finished and they could leave.

  For a long time on the drive back, Kinkaid was silent.

  “Why did you go to the funeral?” Pratt asked finally. “Was he a friend of yours?”

  “I’ve known him all my life.”

  “That isn’t the same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Then why? Do you like funerals?”

  Just when Pratt had decided that his question was going to be ignored, Kinkaid shook his head.

  “I keep wondering why the newspapers are going after him,” he said, as if that constituted an answer—perhaps it even did. “Cheffins wasn’t under investigation, or if he was there isn’t a word of it in the stories. Where are they getting all this?”

  “It isn’t very difficult to sic the press on somebody once he’s dead.” Pratt searched through his pockets for the little cellophane packet of mints he had been given on the plane, and then he remembered he had already eaten them. He decided he was hungry. “Look at Robert Maxwell—look at Elvis.”

  “Bill Cheffins wasn’t Elvis.”


  No, he wasn’t. Pratt had to admit to the justice of the observation. Marshal Cheffins wasn’t Elvis.

  “You make it sound like you think his death had something to do with our little matter.”

  Kinkaid turned to him and smiled a trifle wearily. “Why should it?”

  . . . . .

  When they got back to the house, Pratt noticed that his suitcase had been left ostentatiously in the middle of the front hall.

  “Let me take that upstairs for you,” Kinkaid said, picking it up as if it were a pack of cards carelessly left out. “Julia will have made up the spare room.”

  “Don’t be so sure. I don’t think she likes me.”

  Kinkaid smiled, as if someone had made a lame joke.

  At dinner the conversation was about movies, American foreign policy, the state of the airline industry, baseball—about which Kinkaid seemed to know next to nothing—celebrated criminal cases of the ‘30s and ‘40s, whether global warming was or was not a real threat to the world, and Madonna’s singing ability. Every time Julia came into the room, Kinkaid followed her out with his eyes, which was warning enough to stay on neutral topics.

  When they had finished their dessert, which consisted of little cubes of orange Jell-O, Kinkaid suggested they adjourn to his office.

  “I can offer you a drink if you’d like one,” he said, as if provided a covering excuse. “And you can tell me about your trip.”

  The man’s patience was really astonishing. In three hours it was the first reference he had made to the subject. And now he could wait until he had made his guest a large vodka gimlet and they were quite comfortably seated on either end of the big leather sofa.

  “Andrew Castlesmith died three years ago in an explosion on his boat. The thing just blew up.”

  Pratt watched the skin tighten around Kinkaid’s eyes, exactly as if the news caused him physical pain. Perhaps it even did.

  “Was there any family?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God for that. What about the others?”

  “All the rest are alive. And from what one of them told me, I think they’re safe enough.”

  Kinkaid had nothing except a glass of club soda—come to think of it, Pratt had never seen him drink anything stronger. But, it was an unfortunate choice of virtue. He looked like he could have used a drink.

  “I talked to Stu Geller,” Pratt continued. He had very little inclination to prolong the suspense. “Remember him? He played right tackle. He’s in the Army now, a first lieutenant stationed in San Diego, and he’d never heard of Angela Wyman. None of the other survivors had either. But he told me something interesting. Our four dead heroes and your good buddy at the gas station were a team within the team. They were like a club. If they’d had a good thing going, they would have kept it to themselves.”

  “So the loop closes with Charlie Flaxman.”

  “Or around him, depending on how you want to look at it.” Pratt tasted his drink and tried not to make a face. Kinkaid was a nice guy, if perhaps a little too self-contained for his own good, but he was a lousy bartender. “She’s such a logical suspect, I’m really sorry your little sweetheart is dead.”

  “But she isn’t dead. And she is our killer.”

  . . . . .

  It was the grave, apparently, that tipped it.

  “You have to understand the Wymans,” Kinkaid explained. He seemed to think the family had no more to do with ordinary humanity than if they had come from Mars. “For generations they’ve been like royalty in this part of the state, and that fact became part of how they defined themselves. You should go see their house sometime—it’s huge and grand and imposing, and there’s an eight-foot-high stone wall around it. They didn’t build it to impress other people. They built it because it’s the kind of house a Wyman should live in. There was no way Mrs. Wyman was going to let her granddaughter, the last of the line, spend eternity in some potter’s field for loonies.”

  “So some other woman is buried there.”

  “That’s right, and Angel killed her. When they found the corpse it had no face left. Does that bring back any memories?”

  “Then what about the fingerprints?”

  Kinkaid shrugged, using his left shoulder only, as if the matter were not even worth considering. “I’ve seen her file. Her fingerprints are on a three-by-five card that’s stapled to the inside cover. Hell, she worked in Records for two years. If we assume she set someone up to take her place, she could have switched the prints at any time.”

  “And is that what she did—set someone up to take her place?”

  “Yes. The Wymans had the kind of money that makes anything possible.”

  “And you’re quite sure she killed this nameless young woman? You’re the one who was in love with her—she could do a thing like that?”

  “It wouldn’t have been the first time.”

  Then Kinkaid told him about the night Dominic Franco died.

  He told the story slowly, with a lawyer’s precision, as if it was somehow a psychological necessity to leave nothing out. He did not spare nor condemn his father—he merely reported. And when he was finished, you could almost hear the slam of Marshal Cheffins’ car door as he and James Kinkaid III took Angela Wyman to what they must have imagined to be her final oblivion.

  “When did Cheffins tell you all this?”

  “About ten days ago. I knew by the time you came from Philadelphia, I even told you Angel was dead.”

  “You mind letting me know why you kept it to yourself until now?”

  “I thought it might not matter. I thought I could conceal my dad’s role in all this.” With his left hand, Kinkaid managed a little movement strongly reminiscent of a fish struggling against the hook. “But we’re well past all that now.”

  Pratt knew exactly what he meant but preferred not to acknowledge the suggestion.

  “Do you think you could find this well where Cheffins said he dumped Dominic’s body?” he asked instead.

  “Sure.” Kinkaid nodded. He might have been admitting to a knowledge of contract law. “I think he was talking about the Sinclair place—in fact, I know it. I checked the real estate records at Town Hall, and Mrs. Wyman acquired the property six months after Angel disappeared. My father handled the transaction for her. A couple of deserted farm buildings and forty acres of decaying apple orchard, and it’s still part of the estate. The following year a construction company in Stamford filed for a permit to do some blasting on the site.”

  “So much for Mr. Franco’s earthly remains. Three or four sticks of dynamite lowered down that shaft would have done for him nicely.”

  “Yes, I imagine so.”

  The two men sat silently for a long time, as if trying to wait each other out. If that was what was happening, Kinkaid lost.

  “I think tomorrow we ought to pay a visit to the FBI office in Stamford,” he said finally.

  “If it will ease your conscience.”

  . . . . .

  As Pratt could have predicted, the FBI field man who interviewed them thought the idea was hilarious.

  His name was Wiggins—Special Agent Wiggins, as if you gave up all rights to a first name when you joined the Bureau. He was probably just shy of forty and was beginning to acquire the jowly, prosperous look of a desk cop. He wore a dark blue suit, beautifully shined shoes and, God help us, suspenders. Try as he might, Pratt found he could never quite bring himself to trust a man who wore suspenders.

  Special Agent Wiggins listened carefully to everything that James Kinkaid IV, Attorney at Law, had to tell him, registering no reaction during the recital except, from time to time, a faint smile.

  “Now let me see if I have this right,” he said at last. “A woman named Angela Wyman is going around murdering her old lovers from the New Gilead High School football team. You have it on the authority of this Marshal . . .” He ostentatiously checked his notepad. “Marshal Cheffins, recently deceased, that she committed a similar crime ten years ago. The
lady herself was declared dead—and the fingerprint identification was made by this Bureau—six years ago, but you believe her to be alive and the grave occupied by someone else, presumably another of her victims. Is that a fair summary?”

  “As far as it goes, yes.” Kinkaid nodded, his face grim. He knew perfectly well how it sounded.

  “There is a strong circumstantial case . . .” Pratt started to say before Wiggins cut him off with a wave of his hand.

  “Lieutenant, I have heard a strong circumstantial case made for the notion that President Kennedy is alive and living in a monastery in South Dakota. I’m not interested in circumstantial cases. The Bureau insists on something a bit more persuasive in the way of evidence, and I’m afraid evidence is precisely what you lack. You have no surviving witnesses to the murder of the gardener and no body—you don’t even have a missing persons report. Of your four football players only one is convincingly a homicide. And your principal suspect has been declared dead. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but there are no grounds for opening an investigation into this matter.”

  And that was where they left it.

  Kinkaid, to his credit, didn’t rant and rave about how there was a maniac loose on the unsuspecting world—he didn’t even raise his voice. Instead, he thanked Special Agent Wiggins for seeing them, shook the man’s hand, and left. He was no fool. He knew when he was wasting his time.

  Outside, in the glaring summer sunlight, which is never more intense than in front of a government building, he looked a trifle bewildered, as if he had forgotten where he was.

  “There’s a coffee shop across the street,” Pratt said. “I could use some.”

  They took a booth and Pratt ordered for both of them. Kinkaid merely stared at the table. His coffee was no more than lukewarm before he at last broke his silence.

  “Do you believe me?” he asked.

  “That she’s out there? I believe that you believe it. And I don’t think you’re some kind of hysteric. Let’s say about sixty per cent of me believes it. The rest thinks it’s a lot of hooey.”

  James Kinkaid, Esq. did not seem terribly satisfied with this answer.

  “You’ve got to admit, it sounds weird,” Pratt went on, as if this constituted some sort of apology. “And you’ve got to remember that the one permanent ambition of every FBI agent is to avoid making the Bureau look stupid. I wasn’t expecting any other reaction.”