Angel

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Angel Page 26

by Nicholas Guild


  “Tonight is Christmas Eve. It would arouse suspicion if I were away from home just now. The day after tomorrow, take the train into New York City. I want to see you, child.”

  It was as close to a declaration of love as Angel had ever received from the old woman—from anyone, perhaps, except from Jim Kinkaid. They would meet on the ground floor of Sak’s at one o’clock. They would have lunch together in the restaurant.

  So the next day, which was Christmas, Angel was marooned in New Haven.

  It was perhaps just as well that all the students were gone, or she might not have been able to keep away from Jim. He would be in law school now. Today he would be home, with his father. It was almost possible to hate him for that.

  Except that she did not hate him. She had hated only a few people in her life, and then never for more than a second or two. Love and hate struck her as unintelligible extravagances, like the passions of a child. She had been born with an immunity.

  She wanted Jim Kinkaid because he loved her—or had loved her once. Other men had desired her, but she could sense that his emotions had a different texture from theirs. It had made her feel . . . She was not quite sure what it had made her feel, but she knew she wanted to feel that way again. So she would have to have Jim back in her life. He was hers by right.

  She spent Christmas day wandering around the Yale campus, wondering what Jim’s life was like here. Her experience of the American educational system had been brief and unimpressive. Her notions of school had been formed by the convent in Paris, which she viewed, with some justice, as a sort of well-bred, academical prison. Even though her mother had lived in the same city, Angel had boarded at the convent, to be let out during vacations and for the odd weekend. It seemed to her that she had spent most of her life in one or another sort of prison.

  Clearly this was something different. All of Yale’s buildings seemed to exit directly onto the street—there was no “campus” as such and there were no walls. Where did people go after classes? Could it be, anywhere they wanted?

  She wondered if Jim ever slept with any of the women students. He had never slept with her, had never even touched her breasts, so perhaps not. It hadn’t even seemed to occur to him that such things were possible. Or perhaps he was simply afraid of her grandmother.

  She didn’t really think so. It was she herself he had been afraid of, the way men are always afraid of women.

  The next morning she paid her hotel bill and boarded one of the commuter trains for New York.

  Her grandmother was at her best during that interview. They had hardly sat down for lunch when the old woman took out of her handbag a manila envelope about the size and thickness of a brick and pushed it across the table to Angel.

  “You will find ten thousand dollars in small used bills in there, along with a birth certificate, passbooks to two savings accounts taken out in San Francisco banks and a ticket on tonight’s flight.”

  “You seem eager to get rid of me.”

  Her grandmother ignored the remark. “The money is all in place. All you need do is make yourself known to Mr. Grayson.”

  “Who am I, by the way?” Angel opened the clasp on the envelope and slipped out the passport. “ ‘Alicia Preston.’ A relative perhaps?”

  “Your grandfather’s cousin, on his mother’s side. She died in infancy. Now she will come into a considerable fortune. And she is in my will as the sole beneficiary. She will not have long to wait.”

  It was true. It had been not quite three years since Angel had seen her grandmother, but she looked as if she had aged ten. A waitress brought them coffee and the old woman’s hands trembled slightly as she picked up the cup.

  “There were no difficulties about the young woman, I trust. She is an excellent likeness, but persons of that type tend not to be very reliable.”

  “She will be perfectly reliable after five or six months under the snow.”

  The old woman’s admirable self-possession hardly faltered. She was majestically silent, her lips a little compressed, as if in mild disapproval. Her real state of mind was betrayed only by the way her hands gripped at the edge of the table, as if she feared she might fall out of her chair.

  “What did you expect?” Angel smiled sweetly. “Did you really think I was prepared to trust everything to some little street urchin? Why did you imagine I wanted the fingerprint card?”

  Judge Wyman’s widow shook her head slightly, the reproach seemingly aimed more at herself than anyone else.

  “I sent that child to her death,” she said at last. “She was meant only to play a brief part and then go on her way.”

  “Well, she’ll play it all the better after the spring thaws her out and she’s had a chance to weather a bit. Angela Wyman had to die, Grandmother—I should think you would see that. It isn’t enough for her to just disappear. They won’t stop looking for her until they know she’s dead.”

  “You really are a monster.”

  “Yes. It runs in the family.”

  They never did get lunch. They simply got up from the table and left, taking the escalator down together and parting at the ground floor without a word being spoken.

  For months afterwards Angel waited from some signal that her grandmother had lost her nerve and confessed everything, but it never came. And then, about three quarters of a year later, her lawyer informed her that Mrs. Wyman was dead. The provisions of the will remained unchanged and no one came around with an arrest warrant, so in the end it seemed that family pride had won after all.

  Unless, of course, Grandmother confessed to her lawyer, who would hardly be in a position to notify the police. Perhaps, in the end, that was how Jim came to be snooping around Sherman’s Crest, busily adding up two and two.

  But perhaps all was not lost. Perhaps he would have reasons of his own for keeping the secret, at least until he had served his purpose.

  It would just be more interesting now. She had underestimated Jim—probably that was one of his strengths as a lawyer, that people tended to underestimate him.

  She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  27

  Warren Pratt had been in Paris since one o’clock that morning and so far he didn’t much care for it. The coffee was terrible, there was no soap in his bathroom and none of the hotel staff seemed prepared to admit that they spoke a word of English. From the point of view of a homicide detective these were serious defects.

  Worse was that he had no clear idea what he might be looking for and only one solid piece of information: the address of the apartment that Blanche Wyman had been renting at the time of her death. But it was difficult to imagine how that would help—a trail can grow very cold after ten years.

  He showed the address to a taxi driver who wheeled him around town for about half an hour and then deposited him in front of an imposing gray building on a street lined with imposing gray buildings and demanded twenty-five francs. At least that was what his meter said. Pratt gave him three ten-franc notes and the man drove off as if he had been insulted.

  There were fancy shops and restaurants all along both sides of the street. There were no signs on the buildings above the ground-floor level, which suggested the upper stories were given over to apartments. The sidewalks were clean. The plate-glass windows were polished like mirrors. People were well dressed and there weren’t too many of them. Clearly this was a wealthy neighborhood.

  Pratt decided to look around a little, to get his bearings before he tried the address Jim Kinkaid had copied out for him from one of the letters in Mrs. Wyman’s desk. He crossed the street to look at the building from the other side, and when he happened to glance to his left he noticed that he could see a corner of the Arc de Triomphe, about five blocks away.

  “The guy stiffed me,” he thought. This morning at breakfast he had had almost the same view through the dining room window. He was probably within walking distance of his hotel.

  He scanned the street with a policeman’s eye and noticed a doorway almos
t completely surrounded by magazine and newspaper racks. About half the magazines had naked women on their covers, but Pratt had been in the country long enough to understand that meant nothing about the respectability of the enterprise. Still, back in Dayton the neighborhood newsstand was always a good source for the local gossip.

  He descended about three steps down to a small room containing still more newspaper racks and a glass counter displaying cartons of cigarettes and various other items. The woman behind it glanced at him and then seemed to forget his existence.

  Pratt found a three-day-old copy of the Observer, took it to the counter and then pointed to a small box of licorice.

  “That is four francs fifty,” the woman said, in passable English. “The paper is a three francs.”

  “It’s so obvious I’m a foreigner?”

  The woman shrugged, registering that perfect indifference of which the French are masters. She wore a man’s cardigan sweater over a starched white blouse. Although her hair was died a uniform bright yellow, Pratt would have put her age at about seventy.

  “You buy an English-language paper and, besides, in those clothes you have to be an American. In this business you get to know the types. Do you want the licorice? It is from the Netherlands and not at all what you are used to.”

  “I’ll try it, thanks.” He was partial to licorice. “Do you see many Americans around here?”

  “There are one or two who live nearby. Otherwise, here we are a little away from the tourist track.”

  From the way she looked at him it was clear she knew perfectly well he wasn’t a tourist.

  “You speak beautiful English,” he said.

  “I was married to an Englishman. I spent six years in Birmingham. That was shortly after the War. Have you ever been to Birmingham?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t missed anything.”

  She watched with interest as he took another mint-condition ten-franc note out of his wallet. He was careful to let her see that it came from a big family.

  “There was an American woman who lived just across the street a few years back. Her name was Wyman. Do you remember her?”

  The woman might not have been listening. She ignored the ten-franc note that lay on her counter until Pratt put another one down beside it, then she swept them both up and stuffed them into the pocket of her sweater.

  “She has been dead a long time,” she said. “Why suddenly do you come all the way from America to ask questions about her?”

  “Then you do remember her.”

  “Of course! How could I forget?” She shrugged again, this time punctuating it with a cynical little laugh. “This is not Chicago. It is not often such a thing happens in our placid little neighborhood.”

  . . . . .

  “Oh yes, I remember her,” Madame Augé told him, Augé being the name of her late second husband, the successor to the English soldier she had married in 1945. “She was a client. She bought those thin American cigarettes and British magazines. I got to know her quite well, as one does with some people—she was the sort who would talk to anyone. It was a shock when I heard she had been murdered, but not a surprise. Somebody was going to do it one day. She got on one’s nerves.”

  “Who killed her?”

  “Oh, some brute of a lover—she had a taste for the louche, so I have been told. They never caught him.”

  Pratt was a trifle disappointed but decided not to press the issue. It had been his experience that witnesses tend to supply more detail when they are allowed to tell a story in their own way.

  “Did you know the daughter?”

  “No. Madame Wyman was not particularly maternal, it seems. I did not know she had a child until after the poor woman was dead.”

  That was the pattern. The details of Blanche Wyman’s life were hazy. Only the manner of its extinction stood out with perfect clarity.

  Madame Augé remembered the day well. It was in early May some ten years back and it had rained that morning. She remembered the beads of rainwater on the polished black roofs of the police cars. She remembered how the gendarmes had kept everyone in the neighborhood under virtual house arrest until after lunchtime and how Madame Serif, a particular friend of hers and the concierge of the apartment building, had come running across the street to tell her everything as soon as she was allowed out.

  “Her husband had found the body, you understand. Ernestine was chiefly affected by the novelty. She told me what Claude had told her, but she was very little touched by the tragedy of the thing.”

  “Could you help me get in contact with her?”

  “I am not a médium, my dear. Poor Ernestine is no longer of this world, she and her husband both. They retired four years ago and moved to the South and poof . . . I think they died of boredom.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That Claude had discovered the front door to the apartment standing open. That he went inside, as anyone would—as was his duty—and he nearly stumbled over the corpse of Madame Wyman, sprawled across the entrance to her bedroom, where the shades were drawn and the room was still in twilight. That he would not describe to her the condition of the body, except to say that even after he had switched on the light he could hardly tell who it was.”

  Madame Augé seemed to lose interest in the story. Her attention turned to the stairway that led down from the sidewalk, as if she expected some particularly favored client.

  “It is a hard life for a woman alone,” she said, in what Pratt initially took to be an entirely personal observation. “Even if she is rich it is hard—sometimes particularly if she is rich. And Madame Wyman was a rich woman with a weakness for men from the criminal classes. It was an unfortunate combination.”

  . . . . .

  With certain reservations, Chief Superintendant Daugard of the Sureté was of the same opinion.

  “It was a characteristically French crime,” he said, halfway through his third glass of wine—the Chief Superintendant had taken something of a shine to Pratt, like himself a student and philosopher of homicide, and, since he happened to be in the midst of one of his periodic separations from his wife, suggested that they adjourn their discussion to a local bistro, where they enjoyed a skimpy meal with appropriate lubrication. “In America murder is an extension of commerce and the typical victim is a small-time drug dealer who has become embroiled in some business dispute and is found with five or six bullet holes in his face and chest. The crime is impersonal, tidy and perfectly efficient, and most of the time no arrest is ever made.”

  He looked at his American colleague as if expecting a demur, but the appraisal struck Pratt as essentially accurate and, besides, he didn’t want to deflect Daugard’s attention from the death of Blanche Wyman.

  In the teeth of this perhaps unwelcome concurrence Daugard tasted his wine again, made a face and seemed on the verge of complaining, but then dismissed it.

  “In France,” he continued, as if consoling himself, “In France murder is both intimate and ferocious and is generally the sort of dramatic gesture which disdains consequences. It is for this reason that usually within twenty-four hours we have the guilty party in our lockup and a lengthy signed confession filed with the examining magistrate. Justice has been rendered to everyone’s satisfaction, including the perpetrator’s. A French murderer is not only easier to catch, he has a better sense of theater.”

  “Was Blanche Wyman’s murder good theater?”

  Daugard glanced at him slyly, as if acknowledging the hit and then indulged himself in a deep, operatic sigh—French policemen, it seemed, were also not without a sense of theater.

  “You no doubt refer to the disappointing conduct of René Bec. He was a disgrace to French homicide, but alas, my friend, what can one expect from a failed pimp whose mother was half Algerian?”

  “You never caught him?”

  “No. But never fear that he has gone unpunished. Since we foolishly did away with the guillotine, the worst he faced would have
been a stay in one of our luxurious prisons while he waited for the next general amnesty. As it is, by now surely someone has cut the little rodent’s throat.”

  “Tell me about the crime scene.”

  At first the Chief Superintendant, who was impatiently gesturing at their waiter, appeared not to have heard him. It was only after his wine glass had been refilled that he was once more able to devote his attention to professional matters.

  “Did I tell you it was one of the last cases I handled directly?” he asked. “Shortly thereafter I was promoted and my work is now largely administrative. I have never regretted the change. One can grow weary of anything, even murder. It loses its power to shock.”

  You should have seen Stephen Billinger, Pratt thought to himself, but he said nothing. He merely nodded, one burnt-out homicide detective to another.

  “I have always felt a certain sense of grievance against René Bec—what if he had been the last? One does not like to abandon a lifetime’s work on a false note.”

  Daugard smiled with reassuring cheerfulness and raised his glass, as if offering a toast to some dimly remembered crime.

  “Fortunately a bakery clerk in the Tenth Arrondissement saved me from that fate by beating his sister to death with a silver candlestick, part of their mother’s estate over which they had been quarreling for months. The candlestick, by the way, turned out to be plate.”

  They laughed over this charming irony and then Pratt rephrased his request. “Tell me about the crime scene at the Wyman killing.”

  “Distasteful in the extreme,” Daugart answered, shaking his head. “The weapon was a pair of bronze fireplace tongs, heavier than one would have thought. Madame Wyman’s head was little more than pulp.”

  The food on the Chief Superintendant’s plate was some sort of goulash. He pushed it away from him now as if the sight of it stirred unpleasant memories.

  “There were no signs of a struggle and no signs of forced entry. The victim was found in her nightdress and an autopsy revealed traces of semen, indicating that she had had sexual intercourse within a few hours of her death, which the Medical Examiner put between one and three in the morning. What does one conclude from this? That shortly after entertaining her lover Madame Wyman is beaten to death by someone whom she had voluntarily admitted to her apartment or who had a key, and that that someone had sufficient strength—and, perhaps more important, sufficient rage—to inflict a great deal of damage on the corpse. The incident carries all the hallmarks of a romantic quarrel, wouldn’t you agree?”

 

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