“You want to tell me about it?” she asked, once things had settled down.
“About what?”
“Your spelunking.”
And suddenly he did want to tell her. He wanted to very much. He felt as if the only way to make the thing real to himself was to tell her everything.
“I’ve only been in love one other time in my life,” he said, staring up at Lisa’s bedroom ceiling. “I was twenty and she was about sixteen. It didn’t come to much. One day she just disappeared.”
“Tell me more about the one other time you were in love—other implying ‘as distinct from this time.’”
“Why? Have I neglected to mention that detail?”
“Well, actually, yes you have. But tell me about the girl—your Lolita. Was she absolutely gorgeous? Were you nuts about her?”
“Yes, on both counts. She was the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen in my life. And if I live to be three hundred I hope I never see another like her.”
As he spoke, Kinkaid was conscious of nothing so much as the soft, warm weight of Lisa’s arm as it lay across his chest and shoulder. In comparison with that, it seemed, Angel Wyman had been a troubling dream.
“Try to imagine what it’s like to have loved someone,” he went on, in an attempt to do justice to his old passion, “to have carried the memory of that love around with you for ten years, and then to discover that its object was a phantom. Or worse.”
“How much worse?”
“As bad as it can get.”
“How bad is that?”
“I think she’s out there killing people, sweetheart. I think she’s as crazy was a rabid fox. I think she’s the devil in skirts.”
“Are you putting me on?”
“No such luck.”
For a long, thoughtful moment they were both perfectly silent. A dozen possibilities raced through Kinkaid’s mind, but they all came to the same thing—he had no idea how Lisa would react to this particular truth.
And when she did react it was in the last way he might have expected. She sat up beside him in bed and with a certain deliberation wrapped herself in the sheet, as if announcing that the fun and games were over for this evening.
“I think you’d better tell me about this,” she announced. “I think you’d better start at the beginning.”
It took him the better part of two hours to get through the story, and he had a very attentive audience. Occasionally Lisa would venture a question about a matter of fact—a name, a relationship, the timing of some event—but for the most part she merely listened quietly, as if nothing else in her life mattered.
“And this man Pratt,” she asked finally, when there seemed nothing more she could ask, “this policeman—is he still staying at your place?”
“No. He left this morning to fly back to Dayton. By the way, how would you feel about moving in with me?”
“Are you kidding? What about your housekeeper?”
“I have to grow up someday. How about it?”
“Okay. When is Pratt coming back?”
“No idea. He has a few things to clear up in Dayton and then he’s going on to Paris. Lisa, we have the room.”
“And if you find Angel, what will you do with her?”
“I don’t know. Put a stop to her somehow.”
“Will you kill her?”
“I don’t kill people, Lisa.”
This was not, it seemed, a very satisfactory answer.
“And what will you do while Pratt ‘s in Paris?”
“Get used to living with you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’ll try to piece together how Angel got away. Maybe that will lead me to where she is.”
“How will you do that?”
“Follow the money.”
. . . . .
Because he had discovered something, something which had been left hidden in plain sight.
There was a small collection of reference books on a shelf behind his father’s desk and in one of them, as if the elder Kinkaid had wished to mark his place in Webster’s Pocket Dictionary, was a slip of paper. It was a receipt from Bill’s LockUp in Norwalk, dated January 23, 1990.
Mrs. Wyman had died in January of that year. Kinkaid had driven home from Yale to attend the funeral.
A phone call discovered that the space was paid up through the end of December and nobody at Bill’s was interested in any legal niceties. Kinkaid had the key and he had the receipt, so within five minutes he had everything in the trunk of his car. In all there were four cardboard cartons, sealed tight with plastic tape. It was quite a haul.
He put three of the cartons in his father’s bedroom, which he knew Julia never entered, and carried the fourth into his office. It turned out to contain twelve thick binders, each labeled with the month and the year. They were Mrs. Wyman’s financial records for 1988.
Kinkaid didn’t have to search very far through these to figure out what had happened to the family’s immense fortune—all during that year Mrs. Wyman had been transferring large sums, sometimes as much as a quarter of a million dollars a week, to a bank in the Bahamas. These deposits would hardly have time to clear before the account would be drawn against for an equal amount.
“My guess is the next stop was Panama,” he told Lisa the first Saturday morning after she moved in, after they had padded down to his office in their pajamas. “Their banking regulations mesh with Bahamian law in peculiar ways. The money would go into a joint account, the co-signer would withdraw it and deposit it in another account, also joint, and then the next co-signer, identity unknown, would withdraw it again and the chain would be broken. Almost nine million dollars in a single year. It could be anywhere today and no one will ever be able to trace it.”
Lisa sat on his leather couch with her feet tucked up underneath her, looking like a child listening to a bedtime story. The new domestic arrangement was a big success—even Julia seemed to approve.
“So you won’t be able to find Angel?”
“Not a chance. I can’t even find her bagman in here.”
“Her what?”
“Someone had to set this up for her,” Kinkaid said, his finger moving in a wavy line down the columns of figures. “It wasn’t my father because I’ve got his passport and I know it hasn’t been used since 1976. But someone made a nice living wearing his suits shiny on a succession of airline seats. All these deposit slips aren’t cable traffic—she probably didn’t want to leave a paper trail that the IRS could follow, so she had everything hand-carried.”
“Then why didn’t she destroy all this?”
“Because Mrs. Wyman was who she was, and it never would have occurred to her that anyone might have the effrontery to go through her private papers.”
“Then if you want her bagman, why don’t you look for him in her cancelled checks?”
It was a suggestion of such dazzling simplicity that Kinkaid was a moment taking it in.
“Jim, sometimes I think you’re too clever for your own good.”
It was a fair criticism. A legal education breeds a distaste for the obvious, Kinkaid told himself while, back in his office, he rummaged through the monthly bank statements which he had carried away with everything else in Mrs. Wyman’s writing desk but until now had not troubled himself to look at.
And there he was. Almost every envelope contained a check made out in Mrs. Wyman’s spidery hand to a “Lewis Olmstead,” sometimes for amounts in excess of $10,000.
There was no Lewis Olmstead in the directory, but a search through the library’s archive of out-of-date phone books revealed that, up until three years ago, there had been a private detective agency listed in the Stamford yellow pages as “Olmstead Investigations,” no address given.
Without much hope, Kinkaid dialed the number.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Olmstead?”
“Who wants to know?” the name answered, in a voice that sounded rusty with disuse. “You selling something?�
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“Mr. Olmstead, I got your name from a former client. I wonder if you . . .”
“You a bill collector?”
“Mr. Olmstead, I’m a lawyer. Now are you still in the private detective business, or should I call someone else?”
This seemed to require a moment’s reflection, for there was a longish pause during which Kinkaid could distinctly hear the man’s breathing.
“You can’t be too careful in my profession—and I’m damn good at it. You know Whitby Street?”
“I’m sure I can find it.”
“You come to 127 Whitby Street. You park your car in front of the grocery store. Maybe I’m home and maybe I’m not.”
Judging from the mingling of small storefront businesses with residential property, Whitby Street was not a neighborhood where the zoning codes were enforced with much vigor. The first block had a beauty parlor and, directly across from it, a coffee shop. The signs were in Spanish. The lawns in front of the tiny houses were well kept and, in some cases, enclosed in chain-link fences. After that, however, the process of urban decay was visible almost from building to building.
By the time Kinkaid found his grocery store, which looked permanently closed, he was beginning to regret that he had driven his father’s car down here.
127 looked as if it hadn’t been painted since the Carter Administration. The front yard boasted a collection of well-worn automobile tires, and the lid on the mailbox, which was nailed to a porch pillar, was so twisted out of shape that no one would ever close it again.
Kinkaid did not even have to knock, because Olmstead had apparently reached the intended conclusion about the Mercedes and decided that his visitor was unlikely to be a bill collector. He was standing in the doorway, a man of about fifty dressed in a black tee shirt and walking shorts of indeterminate color. He looked ill and clearly had not shaved anytime in the last three days.
“Mr. Olmstead? I’m James Kinkaid.”
“The guy on the phone,” Olmstead answered, ignoring Kinkaid’s offered hand as he stepped aside to let him in. Then he seemed to remember his manners. “You want a beer?”
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
Kinkaid smiled, as if excusing his own eccentricity, and looked about him. The front room was hardly larger than ten by ten. Beyond it was a stucco archway leading into a tiny kitchen, and somewhere there was probably a single bedroom. Yet small as it was the house was a shambles. The furniture, which probably came with the lease, was faded and torn, and there were open newspapers lying about on the floor. The single table was decorated with a full ashtray and several water stains. There was dust everywhere.
“It’s a mess, I know,” Olmstead announced, as if the condition of the house were some irrevocable calamity over which he had not the slightest control. “I’ve been busy.”
It was a lie for which he couldn’t have entertained much hope, because clearly he wasn’t prospering.
“I’ve been sick,” he continued, perhaps more accurately. “Prostate trouble—in and out of the hospital all year. Probably have to have the thing out before I’m done. Sit down.”
Kinkaid chose the sofa, as probably the safest, and it groaned uneasily under his weight.
“Where did all the money go?” He smiled again, the soul of affability. “By my calculations you were pulling in close to a hundred thousand a year while Mrs. Wyman was alive, so you must have some pretty expensive weaknesses. Was it gambling or are you on something?”
“Fuck you, shyster. You can’t talk to me like that. Get out of here.”
“How much are you in the hole, Mr. Olmstead?” Kinkaid went on, as if he hadn’t heard a thing. “I need some information about what you were doing to earn all that lovely money, and I have deep pockets. And you needn’t worry about self-incrimination. If you like, we can regard this conversation as covered by lawyer-client confidentiality and, besides, if I wanted you behind bars you’d already be there.”
By then the man was standing over him menacingly, but Kinkaid appeared not to notice. He took out his checkbook and, balancing it on his knee, wrote out a check for $500, payable to Lewis Olmstead, which he guessed was probably more money than that individual had seen in several months. When he was finished he tore the check out, folded it in half and stuck it in his shirt pocket.
“Sit down, Mr. Olmstead, and tell me the story of your life.”
. . . . .
Two hours later they were like old friends. Kinkaid had even accepted a beer.
“I’m not stupid,” Olmstead confided, as if it were some kind of secret. “I knew there was something fishy. I was getting paid too much for it to be anything except crooked.”
“There’s nothing illegal about transferring money to overseas banks. It can be fishy without being crooked.”
Like someone who has received hints of a new reality, Olmstead seemed to consider this for a moment. At last he nodded, conceding the possibility.
“But it was fishy. Am I right?”
“Oh yes.”
Olmstead nodded again. That was enough—they were both men of the world, and sometimes it isn’t a good idea to go into detail.
“I liked the Bahamas,” he said, a little wistfully. “Sometimes, if it was a Friday and my plane was delayed, I’d get to stay over for a weekend. You can get used to anything, even banana daiquiries under the palm trees.”
“Did you ever travel anywhere else for Mrs. Wyman?”
“Like where?”
“Like maybe Panama.”
“No.”
“Anywhere else?”
“San Francisco one time—two hours, can you believe it? I was in San Francisco for two hours. Never even got to leave the airport.”
“What did you do there?”
Apparently remembering was an effort. Olmstead frowned and took another pull on his beer. He had been working on the same bottle for two hours so, whatever his other vices, he was at least not a drunk.
“Met a guy in the coffee shop. Gave him an envelope. That was it.”
“Would you know him if you saw him again?”
“No.”
It didn’t matter because the essential point was made. Sometimes it was better not to let a witness know when he has said something important. Kinkaid changed the subject.
“The account in the Bahamas was joint. Did you ever meet the co-signer?”
“No, but I knew who he was.” He shrugged, the modest detective disclaiming any special gifts beyond those granted by experience. “The airport down there wasn’t that big. You fly in and out all the time, the way I did, and you get to know the regulars—at least by sight. Then you see the same guy an hour later in the lobby of a bank and you draw some conclusions.”
“What was he like?”
“Slight, slender, Latin. Carried a briefcase that was bigger than he was. Had a moustache, the way they all do. Favored white suits.”
“Did you ever notice what airline he used?”
“Air Latinas.”
Kinkaid wrote down the name and then closed his notebook. He smiled as blandly as he knew know.
“And now maybe you’d like to tell me where you found the girl.”
25
The change in Olmstead was immediate. A man may cheerfully confess to fiddling the tax laws, but this was something different. Clearly, he didn’t want to talk about the girl.
Which meant, of course, that there had been a girl.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do.” Kinkaid crossed his hands over his notebook, now closed, and shrugged. “Why? Was is a big secret?”
“There was no girl.”
“Wasn’t there? About twenty, five five or a little over, slender, light blond hair—sound familiar?”
“That sounds like a lot of girls.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Lew. I can leave you out or I can leave you in. It’s my choice. I don’t think you’ll enjoy prison.”
“Listen, there wasn’t any
law against that. I just . . .”
“You just what, Lew?”
It was almost possible to feel sorry for him, because he was trapped and he knew it. He wouldn’t dare lie now, which meant that he had to live through it all over again.
“Start at the beginning, Lew. Take it one step at a time.”
But where was the beginning? How soon had he reached the point when Mrs. Wyman owned him the way someone owns the change in their pocket? Did she have something on him—was that the way it had started?—or was it simply the money? After a while, money gets to be like the air you breathe . . . .
“She told me, ‘Find someone.’ Everything you said—twenty, medium height, hair almost white. She was very specific. And someone nobody would ever miss. A stray. ‘You can be sure no harm will come to her. She will do one thing for me and then neither of us will ever see her again.’ I didn’t want to know what it was about, but I’d learned by then. You didn’t say no to that old bitch.”
So he had begun prowling around. “Half the people in the world are women, but pick a type and then just try to find her. It took me the better part of three months. Girls with no strings attached are harder to come by than you think.”
The search ended in New York City at two o’clock in the morning, the hour and the place where it probably should have begun. There are designated patrol areas on the West Side, much favored by middle-aged husbands from New Jersey who want to party, where all you need is a car and a handful of twenty-dollar bills. The whores march up and down the sidewalks in platoons.
And sometimes there are turf battles, an inevitable occurrence in such a highly competitive profession. A new girl, just breaking into the business, can set up shop on the wrong street corner and end the night in the emergency room.
“By the time I turned up the fight was as good as over. Jenny was bent back over the hood of a car, getting her face rearranged. All I could see was her hair, but I knew she was my girl. That was her name—Jenny.”
Her attacker was a Puerto Rican hooker who was using her fist like a hammer. Olmstead had started out in life as a vice cop up in Albany, so he was neither sentimental about women nor particularly chivalrous, and he knew the odds were good that this one, who looked like she was getting a little old for the trade and was thus naturally protective of her territory, had a straight razor in her handbag. He came up behind her and kicked her feet right out from under her. She went down with a bang and, just for good measure, Olmstead gave her the point of his shoe square in the midsection. Problem solved.
Angel Page 24
