“I’ll tell you what, then. I’ll ask you another question, and this time if you know what’s good for you you’ll tell me the truth. What is your involvement with this woman?”
“Why should I tell you that?” Rizza nearly shouted—the mingling of fear and anger in his voice was almost answer enough. “Maybe I’m just wasting my time with you. Maybe I should just pop you right now. Maybe you don’t know shit.”
“Then let me tell you something for free, and if I’m right you’ll know why you should answer my question.”
“So tell me.”
“‘Alicia Preston’ is the most dangerous woman you’ll ever meet in your life.”
And Rizza knew it. You could see it in his eyes. Save me from this, they said, and I’ll give you anything you want. Even your life.
“She knows things about me,” he said. “She has proof. She can put me on Death Row anytime she feels like it.”
“And just killing her, I take it, does not happen to be the solution?”
“No. I touch her, everything goes to the cops.”
“I see.”
In the melancholy silence that followed, Kinkaid decided that he lost nothing by telling this frightened thug some small part of the truth. After all, the truth could sometimes be the basis for a successful bluff.
“Her real name is ‘Angela Wyman’,” he began, noting the slight flash of recognition in Rizza’s eyes. “On her mother’s side she is the last surviving member of an old and wealthy Connecticut family—her father is unknown, even by name. Ten years ago in a fit of rage she killed the gardener on the Wyman estate, but her grandmother managed to hush it up and had her sent away to a mental hospital. She escaped, and a body was subsequently found which was identified as hers.”
“So whose was it?” Rizza leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “I mean, how could the cops make a mistake like that?”
“They didn’t make a mistake, any more than you make a mistake if you step on a land mine. They were the victims of a carefully planned deception. So was the young woman who occupies Angela Wyman’s grave—some innocent, chosen for the part. She was the second person known to have been murdered by Angela Wyman—there have been at least seven others since and probably more.”
“Jesus.”
Frank Rizza, the gangster, the bad guy of such impressive local reputation, could only shake his head. It was impossible to avoid the impression that his astonishment was shaded with a certain awed respect.
At last he glanced at Kinkaid and his eyes narrowed.
“So what’s your angle? What are you going to do about it if you find her?”
“I haven’t got an angle. I just want to put her away, so that this time she never gets out. That’s why I’m here.”
“How? How will you do it?”
“She was fingerprinted in Paris when she was fifteen years old. If I can find her, I can prove she’s alive. And if she’s alive she’s a murderess.”
“That won’t help me any,” Rizza said with a kind of baffled disapproval, as if Kinkaid had suggested something he found morally distasteful.
“I know it won’t. And if she finds out about me and spooks she’s very likely to just disappear, in which case she’ll probably burn you just for the fun of it.”
“So maybe I oughta just take you out of the frame.” Rizza’s hand went into the pocket of his jacket. “What do you think?”
Kinkaid smiled pleasantly. “I’m not an idiot, Frank. The evidence that will do for Angel Wyman is in the hands of the police—they also know about you, by the way, so if I should just happen to go missing I’m sure they’ll draw the obvious conclusion. What do you think—if I end up as an item in the tabloids and you get hauled in for questioning, how is Angela likely to react? And what do you think she’s likely to do about it, just before she disappears down the rabbit hole?”
“Then I’m fucked. I’m really fucked.” The hand came back into sight, empty, and lay helplessly in Rizza’s lap. “I’m really fucked.”
“Maybe not.”
32
Angel left her car in a parking lot right at the foot of Lombard Street, almost as soon as she got off the Golden Gate Bridge. Then she called a cab to take her to the Saint Francis Hotel.
As “Agnes Wycott” she had made her reservation through a travel agent in Los Angeles. She had an American Express card in that name. It was a name she used a good deal. Agnes Wycott had a long credit history, if anyone was interested in checking.
So she arrived by cab, which furthered the desired impression of an anonymous business traveler. Her luggage consisted of a briefcase and one small, gray, soft-sided bag. She wore a gray suit. It was a color she knew did not become her.
The woman at the front desk looked her over carefully—people always looked; it was something to which Angel had long since become accustomed—but she would remember nothing unusual. Nothing she would ever think fit to mention to anyone.
Hopefully there wouldn’t be any reason to remember anything. Angel only wanted a peek. Anything else would require a great deal more planning and, in any case, she didn’t want anything to happen to Jim Kinkaid while he was in San Francisco. She would prefer some neutral site. She would just have a look around and leave it at that.
The reservation was for two nights and was paid in advance. Angel didn’t expect to occupy her room for more than a few hours.
Getting the hotel and the room number had been the easy part. All she had had to do was to phone Gilhuly, Carp and Dunlap, pretending to be a secretary at Karskadon and Henderson who had misplaced the relevant file card—“Be a sweetie, would you? God, my boss is Genghis Khan and I could lose my job . . .” The hard part had been getting her hands on a maid’s uniform.
The hotel supplied them and they were sent out to be cleaned. There were less than a half dozen laundries that catered to the hotel business. Again she phoned, calling them one after the other. She was the assistant housekeeper and she wanted to know why the uniforms hadn’t been starched properly. The first three had told her she was crazy, but the Sacramento Street Commercial Laundry had asked her for an invoice number.
A week ago she would have called Frank Rizza, who would have found out that one of the press operators was a heroin addict or was into a loan shark for ten thousand dollars, and she would have had the uniform by lunchtime. But she couldn’t trust Rizza anymore. She had seen him at the airport the day Jim’s plane came in. It hadn’t been a coincidence. He had followed Jim down to the luggage pick-up. He might even have followed him into San Francisco.
It wasn’t very difficult to hide in a crowd. Angel had learned a long time ago that her particular type of beauty found its source in a certain perceived fragility and that nothing was easier than to coarsen a delicate face with makeup. Her eyes were her only really striking feature and even they would yield to colored contacts and a lot of shadow—that was better even than dark glasses because less obviously concealing. Add a dark wig and she seemed a different person.
But with Jim, as she soon discovered, she had to be careful. She had waited at a magazine stand and then dropped in behind him in the surge of passengers from his flight, but she could tell quickly enough that he sensed something. He kept looking around, as if trying to identify what was out of place. He was too wary. She had had to break away after only a few seconds. If she hadn’t, she was sure he would have spotted her.
In a way it was reassuring. Even after ten years, she apparently remained fresh in his memory. He could know everything about her, everything she had done, and he was still her lover.
Rizza had almost bumped into her and never noticed.
She was going to have to do something about Rizza. He was playing some game of his own—she was quite sure of that. Besides, he had almost outlived his usefulness.
And in the meantime, because of Rizza’s apparent defection, she had had to deal with the Sacramento Street Commercial Laundry on her own.
So she took a chance. Sh
e walked straight in the front door Saturday morning and simply asked for what she wanted.
“Look, we’re in something of a bind over at the hotel,” she told the man at the counter—thank God it was a man; a woman would have been more suspicious. “Some idiot dropped the housekeepers’ uniforms in a tub of bleach, and not one of them is fit to be seen in. I know they aren’t due yet, but could we get a couple of dozen just to tide us over?”
She had smiled sweetly and pulled a wad of loose bills out of her purse. All the while the laundry clerk, who was about sixty with the neck of a walrus and a tongue that looked too big for his mouth, stared at her with an expression of vacant puzzlement.
“They’ll be on the truck this afternoon, lady,” he said, as if begging for mercy.
“Trouble is, we need them now.” Angel started counting off twenty-dollar notes. “Just credit our account, okay?”
When she reached a hundred she looked up at him and let her smile change just a little, to suggest she might be about to turn nasty. The man climbed off his stool and went into the back.
He was gone for maybe five minutes. It seemed like an eternity—was he back there calling the hotel? The police? Finally he reappeared with a large parcel wrapped in brown paper.
He seemed to take forever filling out the receipt.
So she had the uniform. It was in her briefcase, which had come up on the porter’s cart. But her means of obtaining it imposed a time limit.
Because Sacramento Street Commercial, if they were to be believed, would have delivered the rest of the laundry Saturday afternoon. The sign in the window listed their business hours as nine to five, and they were closed all day Sunday, so it was unlikely that anyone at the hotel had had a chance to discover that the delivery was two dozen uniforms light and lodge a complaint about it in time to hear about how someone from Housekeeping had come by especially to pick them up. But by Monday morning everyone would realize that a theft had taken place. So by Monday morning Hotel Security would be looking for an unfamiliar face above a hotel uniform.
Angel was not happy with Sunday—people slept late on Sundays, especially when they were in a strange city and therefore perfectly at their leisure—but there was no other choice. She wanted a look through Jim’s things, although she couldn’t have said why exactly, and this was absolutely the only chance she was going to get.
It was nine-thirty in the morning by the time Angel had changed into the loose-fitting, heavily starched housekeeper’s uniform. She used the telephone on her night table to dial the hotel operator.
“Room 521 please.” She let it ring for a full minute before she hung up.
Her own room was two floors above. She took an armload of towels from her bathroom and went down the cavernous interior stairway that was used by the hotel’s employees. She met no one.
On the fifth floor there was a housekeeping cart parked in front of Room 536—Angel could hear the toilet flushing through the open door. She figured she had a good forty-five minutes.
One of the many skills Angel had perfected during her time as a psychiatric patient was lock-picking. One of her mother’s hoodlum lovers had taught her how when she was no more than twelve, and the convent had provided many opportunities for practice, but Sherman’s Crest had been her postgraduate course. In a mental hospital everything is kept locked—the pharmaceutical closets, the filing cabinets, every door in every building, even the one to your own room, everything. As a medium of barter, narcotics are better than money. If you can get into the files you not only have access to information but you can rewrite your own history and identity. And when it is time to leave . . .
One learns to dispense with keys.
So the lock on Jim’s door presented no difficulties. She was inside in less than ten seconds.
The room had two large windows through which hard, sharp blocks of sunlight seemed to force their way, to rest precariously against the carpeted floor. The light was the first thing she saw and for just an instant Angel felt a shudder of dread at the idea of moving out into that cold, white, dazzlingly impersonal space, where she might simply vanish like any other shadow.
Jim spends hours and hours in this room, she thought. He isn’t afraid of the light.
It was only then that she noticed the double bed, and the second suitcase resting on a luggage rack beside the closet.
And then she became like two separate people, the one who experienced the rage and the one who observed the experience. It had simply never occurred to her that Jim might not be alone in the world, as she was alone. They had been apart for ten years, and yet she never thought of him forming any other attachment. She always imagined him as waiting, as she waited. They had moved far apart and now they were moving closer together, but always in her mind each had remained for the other as the only fixed point.
She felt wash over her a humiliated fury at his betrayal and in the same instant stood aside from it and knew that it was unrealistic, even ridiculous.
I really am mad, she thought. Grandmother, the doctors, all of them—they misunderstood everything. I am madder than any of them ever guessed.
And then Angel was only herself again, and the rage was all that was left.
. . . . .
Every morning the pattern was the same. Jim, who seemed to be able to get by just fine on about six hours sleep, was out of bed while it was still dark, and without switching on the light he would slip into the running outfit and do five or ten minutes of stretching exercises, all without making a sound. In the hotel she sometimes heard the room door closing behind him as he left, but usually she did not wake up until he had been gone for half an hour or so.
His run averaged about an hour during the week and perhaps an hour and a half on the weekends. She always tried to be showered and dressed by the time he came back—he was more fastidious than any man Lisa had ever known and he didn’t like her around while he cleaned up. He never said anything; it was just something she sensed. Perhaps he thought she would find his sweaty body offensive. She didn’t know.
So she would wait downstairs for him to be finished and then they would have breakfast together. At home Julia had the table laid by seven-thirty. Julia would serve and then disappear—her little contribution to their domestic happiness. Contrary to all expectations, Julia seemed to like having another woman in the house.
There was a coffee shop around the corner from the hotel. They would meet in the lobby and then go there. Jim had only ordered room service twice, and never for breakfast. He seemed to think room service was slightly immoral. So at about five minutes after seven she would see him sliding through the front doors of the hotel, glance around until he spotted her and then pass on to the elevators with a smile and a little waggle of his hand. Then she would know she had about twenty minutes to wait.
Except that this morning he didn’t return. She didn’t think very much of it when he wasn’t back by seven-thirty because, after all, this was the weekend and sometimes, when he felt strong, he would run for as long as two hours. Then it was eight o’clock. At eight-thirty she checked at the desk, just to see if Jim might have phoned. But the slip the clerk handed her was only a message from Warren Pratt, stating that his plane would be arriving at two-twenty that afternoon. Lisa hadn’t even known he was coming.
By nine she was seriously worried.
And there wasn’t anything she could do. Lisa did not have a highly developed sense of direction and after a week San Francisco was still a maze to her. Besides, she didn’t have a clue where Jim went on his runs. She couldn’t track him down and there was nothing useful she could tell the police.
By nine-thirty she was giving active consideration to phoning the hospitals.
But the possibility that he might have been sideswiped by a taxi wasn’t what alarmed her. She kept remembering the man they had seen in the restaurant the night before last. She kept remembering Angel Wyman. Better an errant taxi than either of those—the taxi would only kill by accident.
The corridor on the fifth floor was shaped like a capital “L” and their room was just at the angle, at the very corner of the building but with a view of Union Square.
The even-numbered rooms were along the interior side and odd-numbered ones faced out onto the street. When the elevator doors opened, Lisa saw the big stainless-steel housekeeper’s cart in front of Room 530. In a split second, and merely to distract herself a little, she developed a theory that the housekeeper must work like a mail carrier, doing one side of the street and then the other, without crossing over, because their room was never done before the early afternoon.
So she was surprised a few seconds later to see the door to their room open and the housekeeper come out with a set of towels over her arm.
And then it occurred to her that she could hear the vacuum cleaner running in Room 530.
When she saw the housekeeper’s face—that exquisite face, framed with hair so blond it was almost white—she knew at once.
Lisa did not know where she found the courage to keep walking. The woman in the housekeeper’s uniform clutched the towels to her as if they were struggling to escape. As they passed in the corridor she glanced at Lisa in a speculative, predatory way. Their eyes met for just an instant. Lisa kept right on going, past the woman, past the door to Room 521, around the corner. She almost panicked when she saw that the corridor ended in a blind wall.
But she forced herself to keep walking. She did not look back. She did not dare. There was a stairwell somewhere. There had to be. Yes—there was.
She almost threw herself against the door. There was a landing with a cement floor, and a heavy metal guardrail. She bolted down the stairs, taking them two or three at a time. Her flat-soled leather shoes clattered against the cement so that she could not hear if someone was following her.
By the time she reached the ground floor she was panting for breath and close to terror. She opened the door and stepped out into the lobby, forcing herself to stop running and walk. She had to look as if nothing had happened.
Angel Page 30
