Apparently her act wasn’t too polished, because one or two people turned to stare.
In the lobby she saw Jim coming through the front door. She almost fell into his arms.
“I’ve seen her,” she murmured, pressing her head against his chest. “Angel.”
33
Falling backward into the darkness, one grabs at anything.
It did not take Kinkaid very long to figure out that Frank Rizza, sitting on a packing case with a gun in his pocket, considered himself in as much danger as his prisoner, sitting on the concrete floor in his gym shorts. All that was required was to play upon his fear.
“Do you want me to help you?”
Rizza looked surprised, then suspicious. “Whadaya mean?”
“Give me a dollar.”
“What the fuck . . ?”
“Give me a dollar.”
Apparently not knowing what else to do, Rizza took his wallet out and extracted one very crisp bill and handed it to Kinkaid, who thrust it into his shirt pocket without looking at it.
“That was a hundred,” Rizza said, in a slightly offended tone. “I can always take it back if I decide to kill you after all.”
“I’m now your attorney.”
“You’re WHAT?”
“You’ve just given me a retainer and I’m now your attorney. Everything you tell me is covered under the confidentiality of the lawyer-client relationship. So what precisely does Angel Wyman have on you?”
It was one too many for poor Frank. He looked so bewildered that Kinkaid was half tempted to just get up and walk out—he had the distinct feeling that no one would try to stop him.
But it wasn’t to be. Kinkaid had also decided that this dumb thug might have his uses.
“Answer the question.”
“You outta your mind?” It seemed an honest question. “Why the fuck should I tell you?”
“Because I need to know, Frank. Now, once more, what did you do and how can Angel prove it?”
“I’m not gonna tell you, Counselor.”
“Fine. It’s your choice. Good luck on Death Row.”
“I killed this broad,” Rizza answered finally. It was obviously a painful admission. It offended his pride. “I got a little carried away, which ain’t to say she didn’t have it coming. Angela—Jesus, is that really her name?—she’s got the whole thing on film. She’s also got the body somewhere.”
Kinkaid took a chance and stood up. When Rizza didn’t shoot him and his legs didn’t collapse out from under him, he ventured to walk around a little. Then he decided he was tired and found his own packing case to sit down on.
Angel had the whole thing on film. And the body. Well, why not? He also decided that, if somehow he got out of this alive, nothing would ever surprise him again.
“That’s the point. She doesn’t have it. Admittedly, I can’t say about the body. She might be keeping that in a freezer down in her basement. But the film is in her lawyer’s safe.”
“So?”
“I can get to her lawyer,” Kinkaid said, as if announcing that the firm’s number could be found in the telephone book—he thought he was doing pretty well, considering he was making it up as he went along. “His name is Grayson and at the very least he’s guilty of misprison of a felony, and when he finds out what his client has been up to he’ll do anything necessary to climb out from under. I’ll explain to him everything I know and can prove about how Angel Wyman laundered some forty million dollars and how she couldn’t have done it without his knowledge and assistance. Then I’ll present him with a simple choice. Believe me, all I have to do is offer him an out and he’ll give me the law school diploma off his wall.”
“Angela ’ll have his butt.”
“Angela will be in prison, or in a hospital for the criminally insane.”
“She’ll still have the body.”
“The body means nothing without the film, and I’ll have the film. The lawyer will deny that he ever knew anything about it. With any luck, they’ll add your girlfriend to Angela’s felony murder indictment.”
Rizza liked that idea. He liked it so much he actually grinned. He couldn’t help himself.
There was, of course, one problem. Eventually it had to occur even to Rizza.
“You just said it. Then you’ll have the film.”
“Frank, what am I going to do with it?” Kinkaid smiled, as if touched by such naïveté in a career criminal. “If I turn it over to the police, you’ll have me killed. And even if you don’t, I will have destroyed my career. How could I possibly explain how I got it? Believe me, I don’t even want to see it. I don’t want to know anything about it. If I get it, it’s yours.”
Rizza thought about the matter, his face rumpling with concentration, and at last he decided.
“Okay, Counselor, let’s say I believe you. But just remember one thing, okay? You cross me, you won’t live long enough to get disbarred.”
. . . . .
Then the conversation turned to practical considerations. Rizza had to be made to understand that if Angel sensed a trap she would simply disappear—after all, she had done it before. She probably had an escape already planned against just such a contingency. In which case Rizza would be in jail before nightfall.
“I give you the film, then you give me Angel. But until then, you stay away from me. I’m in San Francisco on business, and you’ve never heard to me. Clear?”
“Yeah yeah—I get it. But you don’t get Angel until I get the film.”
“Can you deliver?”
“Oh yeah, I know where she lives. She’s got a house on the beach—I’ll tell you that much for nothin’. And you don’t have to worry that I’ll welch on you. I just wish I could be there to watch when they put the straightjacket over her head.”
Then Kinkaid remembered that he had once loved Angel Wyman, and he felt something that almost amounted to shame.
“You want a lift back to your hotel?” Rizza asked, his attitude by now almost benevolent.
“No thanks. I’ll walk.”
“You pissed off I had them work you over?”
“No—I understand. Business is business.”
“Then why . . ?”
“Look, it’s better we’re not seen together. Okay?” Kinkaid attempted a smile, but it wasn’t very successful. “Besides, the exercise will keep me from stiffening up.”
So he walked back to the Saint Francis. It was a distance of slightly more than two miles, but it took him an hour and a half. And then, almost as soon as he is through the door, Lisa tells him about Angel’s visit.
“How do you know it was her?”
“You said she was the most beautiful woman you had ever seen.”
It was her. Kinkaid didn’t need to be convinced. He discovered he wasn’t even particularly surprised.
But it wasn’t something they had to stand around discussing in a hotel lobby. “Let’s go upstairs and have a look,” he said.
The room wasn’t disturbed in any noticeable way. The suitcases were shut and locked, and nothing seemed different in the closets and drawers. Nevertheless, Kinkaid took a wastepaper basket and emptied out the medicine cabinet into it.
“It’s a good thing you don’t use Chanel,” he said. “We can afford to replace everything. We’ll find a drugstore this afternoon.”
“I don’t want to spend another night in this room.” Lisa was sitting on the edge of the bed the way people who are afraid of the water sit beside a swimming pool. “I know it’s silly . . .”
“Sounds like a reasonable precaution. Just let me clean up and I’ll phone the front desk and arrange to have us moved. It doesn’t solve the larger problem, though.”
He didn’t elaborate. Instead, he went into the bathroom and started the shower running. Not wanting to be alone in the bedroom, Lisa followed him in and sat down on the toilet seat. It was then that she saw the bruises on his chest and abdomen.
“My God. What happened to you?”
“Some
discussions with a client got off to a rocky start. You remember the man in the restaurant? He’s a local gangster named Rizza. We had a little misunderstanding, but it’s all straightened out now.”
Lisa just stared at him as if he were speaking in tongues.
“It looks worse than it feels.” Kinkaid pressed the fingers of one hand tentatively against his belly and then decided that perhaps he had gotten that backwards. “Don’t worry about it. This is just the way gangsters negotiate—he wanted to be sure he had my full attention, so he had a couple of his associates polish their shoes on me.”
“Oh God.”
“But we’re the best of chums now. Angel keeps threatening to put him in the gas chamber. He’s scared to death of her, so we’ve formed a temporary alliance.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“I think it’s time for you to go home, Lisa.” He said it like he meant it, without raising his voice. “Go back to Daddy and let him lock you in his gun closet. Angel doesn’t seem to have a fix on you yet—I think you’d better get out of here before she does.”
“We’ve had this discussion before. Besides, if she’s been in this room she knows you’re not sleeping with just your teddy bear.”
“Get on a plane and go home. I’ve seen the photographs of what she does to the Significant Others. I can face a lot of things, but I couldn’t face that.”
“That reminds me! Your friend the cop left a message. He’ll be flying in this afternoon.”
She smiled cheerfully, as if no end of proud of herself for remembering.
“I’m not going home, Jim.”
And she meant it too. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t even worth talking about.
The bathroom was gradually filling with steam, so he got under the shower for one of the more excruciating experiences of his life. He had once read somewhere that when people used to be flayed alive the torturer’s assistant would stand by pouring water into the wound to intensify the pain. He could believe it.
Afterwards, however, he felt better. And Pratt was coming. Pratt would know how to keep Lisa safe.
“Do you think there’s any chance they’re still serving breakfast?”
34
Frank Rizza was in a small coffee shop on Vallejo Street when he took the call.
He had a ten-dollar bet on with the owner, who turned out to be a guy he had gone to grade school with, that Terry Szorza could eat his way straight through the doughnut case. There were forty-seven doughnuts in that case, and Terry only had eight white-frosted coconuts to go, so it looked like his money was safe.
“Frank, it’s for you.”
George Bellocchio, who used to deal cigarettes in the boys’ room at North Beach Elementary and sometimes hired out young Rizza as an enforcer, handed him the phone.
“Yeah, what? I’m busy.”
“Mr. Rizza, I think you better get back here pretty quick,”
It was Andy Esperanza, sounding as if somebody had a gun muzzle screwed into his ear. Andy was a clerk in the hardware store that Rizza used as a front and, though he was ambitious for a career in the rackets, maybe as a narcotics runner across the Mexican border, he would be selling fry skillets and copper tubing until he died. Somehow you just expected a spic to have more in the way of balls.
“Yeah well, Andy, I got business here. Whatever it is it’ll keep. Am I right?”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Rizza. There’s a lady waiting up in your office—you know the one I mean.”
Yeah, he did.
He looked at Terry, who was dunking half a frosted coconut into that filthy stuff he called coffee, and saw his ten bucks waving bye-bye. Then he handed the phone back.
“Game called on account of rain,” he said, taking two fives from his wallet. “Tell you what. Next time, double or nothing.”
“Maybe not.” George Bellocchio took the money and rang up a No Sale on his cash register. “I think that guy could eat through the left side of my dinner menu.”
“I think you’re right.”
Rizza let his gaze wander over the coffee shop, with its counter stools and its five tables and its plate glass windows. The place was a dump.
“When we were kids I always thought you’d be the one to make it big in the rackets. What the hell happened, George?”
George leaned against the counter. The hair on his forearms was going gray. He looked out at Rizza through heavy, pouched eyes.
“You remember Dolores Mancuso?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“We got married.”
“That explains everything.”
. . . . .
For all the years he had been working out of Felmer’s Hardware, Rizza had maintained one hard and fast rule: nobody waited in his office. The door wasn’t locked, but it might as well have been—nobody went in there if Rizza didn’t invite them.
And not because he was hiding something. He wasn’t fool enough to have anything stashed there, and the papers in the filing cabinets all had to do with the hardware business. It was a question of privacy. Privacy and respect.
But none of that mattered to Alicia Prescott, a.k.a. Angel Wyman, the Ice Queen. She had come to the store only one other time, a surprise visit to announce that she had a noose tied tight around Frank Rizza’s balls.
“I’ll wait in his office,” she announced to Jerry Langella, who happened to have the watch that morning.
Jerry, who was a big strong boy and a heavy favorite with the ladies, had probably found this amusing—women generally amused him; he was that type—and had probably put one of his large, meaty hands on the arm of her white suit jacket and shook his head.
“I don’t think so. The boss wouldn’t like it.”
And the gorgeous Miss Prescott, as we knew her then, had reached back to take a gardening claw off the wall and had shoved all three points straight through poor Jerry’s elbow.
“I don’t care what he likes,” she said. “You find him and let him know he has a visitor.”
She had done that and nobody had made her disappear into the sewer system. Rizza had returned to have his conversation with her and then had called her a taxi when she was ready to leave, so she was marked down in everyone’s book as privileged. Besides, she was fucking dangerous.
So when Andy said there was a lady waiting in his office, Rizza didn’t have to ask himself any questions.
She looked different today. She was wearing a gray suit—it suddenly occurred to Rizza that he had never before seen her in anything except white—and she seemed to have made herself up to hide her impressive beauty as much as possible.
But it was more than that. She was sitting on a heavy wooden chair that looked old enough to have come west tied to the back of a covered wagon. It was a bitch of a chair, with a seat as flat as a skillet bottom. Everybody avoided it. Not her though. There was something about her that suggested she maybe wanted to be uncomfortable.
And she was angry, if ‘anger’ was the right word. Her eyes were restless and just a shade too bright. She was almost human.
“There’s a man staying at the Saint Francis Hotel,” she said. Rizza felt his heart beginning to pound. “Room 521. His name is James Kinkaid and there is a woman staying with him. I don’t know her name, but you can find it out easily enough. I want you to bring her to me, and I want you to do it this afternoon.”
It was almost a relief. She didn’t know. She wouldn’t be demanding something so crazy if she knew.
“You mean you want me to kidnap her?”
“I didn’t imagine you’d phone and ask her to tea.”
“You can get twenty years for that,” Rizza almost bellowed—Kinkaid was right, this broad was a head case.
“Just remember what you can get for murder, Frank.” She rose from her chair, as if there wasn’t another thing to say. “This afternoon. Phone me when you have her.”
And then she did something really strange. She smiled at him.
“You do this for me, Frank, and you’
re off the hook.”
. . . . .
A snatch was a delicate operation. It required research. It required planning. You couldn’t just grab somebody, not if you wanted to keep out of the slammer.
Besides, Kinkaid was probably going to look upon kidnapping his girlfriend as not in the spirit of their agreement, in which case maybe he wasn’t going to be all that concerned about the lawyer-client relationship.
Not that Angel Wyman cared if maybe your vacation plans didn’t include San Quentin. The inconsiderate, crazy bitch.
But Rizza decided he had to look on the bright side. Maybe she really meant it about letting him off the hook, particularly if he was able to pull her into a kidnapping charge. And Kinkaid wasn’t all that much of a problem—if things began to get tense, Rizza could always send somebody around to put his lights out.
And he knew more about the girl friend than Angel suspected. He knew her name, for one thing. “Lisa Milano,” for all that she was registered at the hotel as “Mrs. Kinkaid.” The first day they were in town, Rizza had bribed one of the housekeepers to search their room, and that was the name on the luggage label. He also knew what she looked like.
It occurred to Rizza that he would have a lot more leverage with Angel if the snatch ended with the victim dead. Then she would have one on him and he would have one on her. It would be a great pity about the Milano girl, but everyone had to make sacrifices.
So all he had to do was pick her up. It was a good thing he hadn’t sent Ralph and Terry home yet. They were great at this sort of work.
“Mrs. Kinkaid.” Jesus. The guy was worried about what the desk clerk thought, as if they cared these days. It was just too quaint.
Which gave Rizza an idea. If Kinkaid worried about her reputation maybe he told her things. Maybe he would have told her about what happened this morning.
But the first thing was to get a clear shot at her, away from Kinkaid, who would only complicate things. It would be dangerous to kill Kinkaid now, since Angel was obviously playing some complicated game with him that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if he were dead. Otherwise, why snatch the girl? Why not just pop the guy and let everybody go home? No, Kinkaid had to be out of the frame so he wouldn’t be tempted into getting heroic and making a nuisance of himself. And, besides, it would be safer if he didn’t immediately figure out that their little arrangement was off.
Angel Page 31
