Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  The convent, of course, was no problem. What boarding school brat hasn’t gone over the wall once or twice?

  And she knew the routines of her mother’s life. She knew when Blanche would be entertaining René Bec and that Bec might then absent himself for a time, for a breath of fresh air or a nightcap or just to get away for an hour or two. Bec would return to an empty apartment, the air cold and stinking of blood, and find Blanche stretched out on her bedroom floor. He would know that he was the obvious suspect. He might have decided to disappear.

  Or maybe Angel was waiting for him. DuBoisseau said Bec was afraid of her, if that was what he had meant, but maybe the canary had come under the cobra’s spell—maybe Bec, against his better judgment, had fallen in love with her.

  “We can run away together,” she might have told him. “Otherwise, I’ll say you did it.”

  In which case, René Bec was somewhere no one would ever find him. He probably hadn’t outlived Blanche by more than a few hours.

  It was not, however, a theory that recommended itself to Daugard. Daugard apparently had romantic notions about the innocence of childhood.

  “Believe me,” he said, as they sat together in his crowded little office. “I interrogated her myself—she was not involved.”

  “Then perhaps René Bec had a rival.”

  “No—it seems not.” Daugard managed a Gallic shrug, as if to say, what a delightful idea, but alas . . . “We went over her apartment with great care, and it would appear that Bec’s hold on her was perfectly secure. We found no fingerprints except those belonging to Madame Wyman, her daughter, Bec and the elderly woman who came in twice a week to clean. There was no one else.”

  In that instant Pratt felt as if he had been startled awake as the obvious hit him with all the force of revelation. Sweet Jesus, he thought, the French police had Angel Wyman’s fingerprints.

  29

  The pilot had announced they would be on the ground in ten minutes. From the window beside his first-class seat Kinkaid could see the long thumbprint of San Francisco Bay glistening in the late afternoon sun. He could see into people’s backyards now. In one of them he saw a woman on a riding mower, wearing a floppy straw hat. Her arms were bare beneath its shade, and her elbows flaired out to the sides as she moved over the bare, parched lawn. She seemed to be traveling faster than the plane.

  “If I live through the landing the rest of my life will hold no terrors for me,” Lisa murmured. She looked a trifle green. Lisa, as it turned out, was afraid of flying.

  “I didn’t think it was a good idea for you to come, if you’ll remember.”

  “Let’s not go through that again.”

  Kinkaid considered the matter for an instant and then nodded. No, there wasn’t any point in going through that again.

  “If you like we can go home by train,” he said.

  Lisa did not look particularly consoled. He had offered her the window seat, but she had declined. She wanted a clear field to the ladies room, she said.

  Kinkaid turned his attention back to the view. The world down there was becoming more real every second. Pretty soon they would be back in it. He wondered, for the millionth time, if he hadn’t been criminally spineless to agree to bringing Lisa with him, and for the millionth time he decided that, yes, he had been.

  Because Angel was down there somewhere. He was sure of it, as sure as if he could see her track in the muddy shoreline of the bay. And Angel was the real reason he had come.

  “It’s a huge deal,” Eric Tollison had said over the phone. “The developer is our client and he’s been throwing up shopping malls all over the Northeast, but he’s stretched too thin and he needs money. The California group has the money—we just have to make sure our client doesn’t have to trade his balls for it.”

  “The biggest real-estate deal I’ve ever been involved in was the sale of a two-family house.”

  “That doesn’t matter, Jim Boy. Our San Francisco affiliates are well versed in the subtleties. I just need you out there to put a little spine into them.”

  Tollison always called him “Jim Boy” when he wanted Kinkaid to play gunslinger. It was just part of the pep talk.

  But spine had been a department in which Kinkaid had been rather conspicuously lacking just recently, as was evidenced by Lisa’s presence here beside him on Flight 5 from Kennedy.

  “What was that?” she asked tensely, clutching at his arm as they heard of shrill whine of the plane’s hydraulics.

  “They’re just lowering the wheels.”

  “We’ll probably crash on the runway.”

  “These big planes are so computerized you won’t even realize it when we touch the ground.”

  “Of course not—I’ll be dead from the impact.”

  Kinkaid smiled. If she was making jokes she was all right.

  He should have said no. He realized that now. But it is hard to be firm about a thing like that when the woman in your life says the whole relationship is on the line.

  “Don’t shut me out now,” she had told him. “You’ve kept this locked up inside you for so long—if you find her out there, and if I’m sitting back here in Connecticut, I think you’ll be alone with it for the rest of your life. Don’t do that to us.”

  And he had at last consented, thinking that, after all, there was probably no real danger. Angel was killing off her old lovers, among whom young James could not be numbered, so there was no reason to believe she would take any particular interest in him.

  But now, with California only two minutes away, he couldn’t help but remember that he really didn’t have any clear idea what was going on in Angel’s head, that her motives were probably intelligible to no one except herself, that he was putting Lisa within reach of a maniac who had killed at least nine people.

  Once they had landed, and the airplane was rolling tentatively around the runway like an old woman in a wheelchair, Lisa jumped up and started wrestling a soft-sided overnight bag free from beneath her seat.

  “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said. “With a mob like this disembarking we’ll have to hustle to get a cab.”

  “Not a problem. The first class luggage always comes off first, so we’ll have a head start, and anyway they’re sending a limousine to meet us.”

  She sat down again with a thud, looking disappointed.

  “I know it isn’t very democratic . . .”

  “That isn’t the point. I was just thinking, a limousine makes it kind of official, doesn’t it. It’s not like we’re sneaking off somewhere nobody knows us for a dirty weekend. I guess I’ll have to get used to being pointed out as The Girlfriend.”

  “We’re living together, remember? If Julia can accept it, so can the brethren at Gilhuly, Carp and Dunlap. Or maybe I could just put you out of your misery—Las Vegas is only an hour’s flight away and there’s no waiting period in Nevada. You could be Mrs. Kinkaid in time for bed.”

  “Thanks, no. If it means another plane ride I’ll go on living in sin. Don’t think I don’t appreciate the thought.”

  “I wasn’t kidding, you know.”

  She smiled at him with that mingling of tenderness and gratitude that always made him understand with perfect clarity why he loved her.

  And then the moment was lost when the cabin door opened and everyone began scrambling for their coats and their carry-ons. They drifted along with the current of departing passengers and suddenly found themselves in the terminal.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Our driver,” Kinkaid answered, lying. He hadn’t been aware he was looking for anyone, but of course he was. It was idiotic, really—as if he had expected Angel to meet their plane.

  “How will he know where to find us?”

  “We’ll find him, probably down by the luggage carrousels. He’ll be standing out in plain sight, probably wearing a black suit and holding up a piece of cardboard with ‘Mr. Kinkaid’ spelled out in block letters. That’s the way it usually works.”
/>   And all the while he spoke his eyes darted about, searching for the face he had not seen in ten years yet which was as familiar to him as his own. She was not among the little knots of people turned expectantly toward the off-ramp, looking for someone they knew to pop out from among the disembarking passengers. She was not sitting in the departure lounge in an attitude of bored hopelessness. She was not one of the ground crew that clustered around the check-in counter. It was with a slight shock that he realized he was disappointed.

  “Are you still in love with her?” Lisa had asked him, more than once.

  He had always answered ‘no’. The girl he had loved was an illusion, as spectral as a ghost. How could love survive the discoveries he had made about Angel Wyman? And yet he was disappointed not to see her face.

  Because he felt her presence, like a stain in the very air. Perhaps he hoped that the sight of her would dispel it.

  “How do you know she’s in San Francisco?”

  He had smiled at the question, because it was so faint a chance. “I don’t, but if she isn’t there I don’t know where else to look. Lew Olmstead came to this airport to meet a man in a coffee shop and give him an envelope. Jimmy Carfax favors a brand of chocolates he has sent to him from California—he told me a friend of his told him about them.”

  “Are you saying you think she’s out here because this is where a nut case gets his goodies?” Lisa shook her head in disbelief. He couldn’t blame her.

  “Okay, it was the way he said it. He was such a coy bastard—he was throwing out a big hint, just for fun. Besides, how many friends do you suppose Jimmy Carfax has in the wide world?”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re going on?”

  “There’s also the fact that the lawyer for the Wyman family heirs is in San Francisco. Personally, if you want to know the truth, I think there’s only one heir.”

  “It still isn’t very much.”

  “No kidding.”

  Yet he had only to set foot in California to know that he had been right. She was here.

  The airport corridors were endless. Near the entrance to the main lobby he saw someone he thought might be their driver—perhaps because he looked somehow familiar—but the man turned and seemed to melt away almost as soon as Kinkaid’s gaze touched him. Otherwise there was nothing.

  She isn’t here, he told himself. She probably isn’t even in the state. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy and she really is buried back in Vermont.

  He didn’t believe it for a moment—she was there, watching him.

  The impression stayed with him, through the long walk to the carrousels, where, sure enough, a man in a dark suit was holding up a sign with “Kinkaid” scribbled across it. It was with him while they waited for their luggage. It did not leave until they did. Only when the door closed on the black stretch limousine and they were on the highway leading north to San Francisco, did he lose the sense that her eyes were on him.

  . . . . .

  But it was Frank Rizza who copied down the number of the limousine as it drove away with Kinkaid and the woman, who looked like she might be Italian—a nice little guinea broad to keep the sheets warm while he had to be away from home. The WASP college boy was slumming.

  Rizza tried to work up some anger against this anonymous lawyer, whom he knew only by sight and through Al DeCosta’s sketchy reports, because he knew he was probably going to have to be fairly hard on the guy and he wasn’t very happy about it.

  The problem was, you do a drug pusher or a pimp or even a customer and the cops treat it like it’s a public service. You can do a whole family of Columbians in one of the housing projects and the investigation won’t last any longer than the publicity. But Kinkaid just didn’t belong to the whackable classes. He was a lawyer and, at least according to Al, he didn’t have any dirt under his fingernails. Living or dead, the guy had clout. Kill him and it’s not a statistic it’s a murder.

  So Rizza knew he would be taking a chance, but he didn’t see he had much choice. He had pretty much decided that Kinkaid was the only way he was going to get himself free from the Ice Queen.

  Al DeCosta had turned up some very interesting information on Kinkaid, which Rizza was inclined to believe because Al hadn’t ended up running Atlantic City simply because he was married to the old don’s only daughter. He was no fool and Old Man Ricolli surely would have died in federal prison rather than in his own bed if it hadn’t been for his son-in-law.

  And according to Al for decades the law firm of Kinkaid & Kinkaid had had as their principal client an old Connecticut family named Wyman, so powerful they almost ran the state. Supposedly they were all dead now, but the house was about to be sold and it turned out that the money was going to the heirs, who were represented by a lawyer in—you guessed it—good old Frisco by the Bay.

  Rizza had made the connection at once. He had known Kinkaid would be his ticket home, from the instant he saw him come out of the church after that hick marshal’s funeral—except for one other guy, who turned out to be a retired cop from someplace in Ohio, Kinkaid was the only one there who wasn’t in uniform. Miss Alicia Preston orders Marshal Cheffins chopped and then, even after the newspapers have had him for breakfast and all the decent citizens want to forget they ever heard of him, our lawyer friend turns up as the chief mourner.

  Then it turns out that Kinkaid was the consigliere for the mandarins who put Cheffins in his job. Could it be that Miss Look-But-Don’t-Touch is tied in with the all-powerful Wymans and she had the marshal killed because he knew something? And maybe Kinkaid is still her lawyer and is in on the secret too.

  In any case, Rizza had decided he just had to have a talk with this guy.

  But it was awkward. Short of sticking a gun up his nose, a lawyer was hard to intimidate. And their first instinct, after they’ve been pushed around a little, is to go to the police and tell them all about it. So Rizza knew he had to be prepared to kill James Kinkaid. He wasn’t pleased about it, but there just wasn’t any nice way to do these things. So what the fuck—it was an imperfect world.

  30

  The law offices of Gilhuly, Carp and Dunlap occupied the fourth floor of a triangular building in North Beach, an area which laid claim to a certain bohemian charm decades after the last beatnik had moved away and the coffee houses had all closed down to be replaced by upscale topless bars that did a brisk tourist business. Kinkaid had been booked into the Saint Francis and his room faced out onto Union Square, which also wasn’t turning away anyone’s money but managed to be a little less obvious about it.

  A car and driver had been put at his disposal, but after the first morning, when he figured out that North Beach was not even a mile from his hotel, he decided that he preferred to walk. He tried to vary his route a little each time, coming and going, but he liked Grant Avenue best because it ran through Chinatown. Sometimes he even walked back to Union Square to meet Lisa for lunch. By the end of four days he had decided that his walks were by far the most interesting part of his trip.

  Because by then he was close to deciding that Eric Tollison had been less than candid with him about what he was supposed to be doing in San Francisco. Certainly there was nothing about this particular piece of business that required his special talents—the boys at Gilhuly, Carp and Dunlap gave the impression they were a pretty hard-nosed bunch who could look out for themselves. They set him up in a borrowed office with a nice view of the street and sent a fair amount of paper across his desk, but they were just being polite. They seemed to think he was there for some sort of crash course in real estate law.

  So why? What was he doing that was worth the daily two thousand and change it was costing Karskadon and Henderson to keep him there? By the weekend he was about ready to phone New York and ask.

  “So why don’t you?”

  They were sitting in a booth in a seafood restaurant down on Fisherman’s Wharf and Lisa was wearing the huge paper bib that had come with her crab dinner—somehow it made her look about nine
years old, which was enough to make Kinkaid feel all runny inside.

  “Because if I do Tollison will either tell me to just go on billing at two fifty an hour and stop talking like a jerk or he’ll say, >okay then, come home.= And I don’t want to go home. All I’ve found out about Angel Wyman so far is that she’s not in the phone book.”

  “Then what are you going to do?” She had slipped out of her shoe and was running her stockinged foot up the inside of his trouser leg, which made it hard to concentrate.

  “Go on billing at two fifty an hour and stop talking like a jerk. And, if you keep that up, we’ll probably end the evening under arrest for lewd and indecent behavior.”

  “I didn’t know that was illegal.”

  “It is in public, even in San Francisco.”

  “Then we’ll make an early night of it, and stay out of jail.”

  At this point they were supposed to exchange intimate, knowing smiles, but Lisa’s face had changed in a way that demonstrated that her attention was occupied elsewhere. She wasn’t even looking at him, but over his shoulder and toward the entrance.

  “What’s the matter?” Kinkaid asked, touching her on the back of the hand to get her attention. “If you want the waiter you’re looking in the wrong direction.”

  That seemed to break the spell. She laughed, although she must have known he wasn’t making a joke, and then went back to pulling apart her crab as if nothing else in the world mattered.

  “I hate to sound paranoid, but I think we’re being followed.”

  Kinkaid glanced first at her and then at his dinner, in which he discovered he had completely lost interest, and then outside, where a seagull had landed on one of the pilings and was observing them both with insolent calm.

  “Anyone I might know?”

  “I don’t think so. I saw him this afternoon, while I was shopping, and I think I might have seen him at the airport when we arrived.”

  “Where is he?”

  “At the bar. But don’t turn around—he’s watching us.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Dark sports coat, yellow shirt. About forty. A little under average height if he isn’t slouching. Dark hair. Southern Italian but not Sicilian.”