Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  Fine. Get the girl by herself. But how do we manage that when the lady says “this afternoon” and it already is this afternoon?

  Rizza thought of himself as a student of military history: he had watched The Civil War series all the way through on Channel 9, had seen the movie Patton twice and had once read a magazine piece about Napoleon. He knew that a commander sometimes had to be audacious.

  So he was going to use himself for bait.

  There were risks. He was kind of a celebrity in San Francisco. Passing Frank Rizza on the sidewalk was something you told your wife about. If he went out for dinner the restaurant owner might come over to his table to have a picture taken together. In the Saint Francis they might send the house detective by to ask him to leave. He was somebody people recognized.

  He couldn’t go into the hotel and meet Lisa Milano in the lobby—as soon as she went missing the police would be all over him. She had to come outside. And Rizza had to figure how to get Kinkaid out of the way for an hour or so.

  Except that in the end he didn’t have to figure anything.

  Rizza’s man at the front desk phoned just before twelve-twenty.

  “Mr. Kinkaid has ordered a rental car.”

  “What time?”

  “One-thirty.”

  “Is he checking out?”

  “No, but he has requested to be moved to another room. And he’s made another reservation. I think he’s picking someone up at the airport.”

  “I want to know when he leaves, and if he’s alone.”

  In the hour he had to think the matter over, Rizza gave serious consideration to the idea of grabbing Kinkaid when he picked up his car. It wasn’t as wild as it sounded—“I’ll just drive you around to the lot, sir. We just need a couple of signatures.” If the girl was with him, there might not be any choice. But the plan he finally settled on was to do it at the airport, in the parking garage. He would have the car tailed and send a couple of teams on ahead. The airport garage was dark and noisy. You could get away with anything in there.

  But at 1:30 Kinkaid left the hotel alone. As far as the desk clerk knew “Mrs. Kinkaid” was still in the room.

  Rizza figured it was about god damn time he had a piece of luck. He dialed the hotel’s main number and asked for Kinkaid’s new room number.

  “Hello?”

  “Could I speak to Jim Kinkaid please.”

  “You just missed him. Who is this?”

  “Is this Mrs. Kinkaid?”

  “Close enough. Now, once more, who are you?”

  “Mrs. Kinkaid, I’m a sort of a friend of your husband’s. We met this morning—maybe he mentioned it to you.”

  There was a pause, during which Rizza couldn’t even hear her breathing. Sure, she knew all about it.

  “He told me about it, and I saw the bruises. He said you were some crook.”

  “I’m a businessman, Mrs. Kinkaid. My name’s ‘Rizza’. Jim is gonna be my lawyer.”

  “Fine. What do you want?”

  “He asked me to get some information for him. If you could say when he’s gonna be back, I’ll phone again. I’m in kind of a hurry.”

  “He’ll be back around three-thirty.”

  “Oh Jeez. That’ll be too late. Maybe I can try again tomorrow.”

  “Leave it at the front desk.”

  “I can’t do that, Mrs. Kinkaid. If you know anything, you know I can’t to that. I guess it’ll have to wait.”

  Again the line seemed to die as she thought it over. She was cautious, but not so cautious that she was willing to just say, “fine, let it wait.” Like any woman, she just wanted to be tempted a little.

  “Listen, Mrs. Kinkaid. Just tell Jim I called and that I’ll be in touch. Okay. It was nice talkin’ to you.”

  “No, wait.” There was an edge in her voice, somewhere between eagerness and fear. “You can leave it with me.”

  “Well, I don’t know . . . I don’t think so. It’s a little touchy, Mrs. Kinkaid—I’m not sure Jim’d like me draggin’ you in . . .”

  “I’ve already been dragged in, Mr. Rizza. If it’s about Angel Wyman I’m sure Jim will want to hear about it as soon as he comes back.”

  “Look, I’m not sure . . . .”

  “Where can we meet, Mr. Rizza?”

  With a vast display of reluctance Rizza allowed himself to be persuaded into naming a tobacco shop just two blocks from the hotel. It was a very public place, on the corner of two streets that got a lot of foot traffic. She would feel safe there, the stupid little guinea broad.

  Rizza hung up the phone, mightily pleased with himself. The tobacco shop was owned by his wife’s cousin’s husband, who would be taking the afternoon off. It was perfect.

  35

  Lisa knew the shop. She had never been inside, but she had passed it several times over the last week and had noticed it the way women do notice such purely masculine shrines. The windows were plate glass and highly polished, but the interior was dimly lit. It looked expensive. It was a place where men went to buy cigars and pipe tobacco, to hear the latest sexist jokes and to be male together.

  Until her father retired from the Marines when she was sixteen, she had spent most of her life on military bases, so she was not unacquainted with the atmosphere and its particular effect on her. The Non-Commissioned Officers’ Mess was a place at once immediately familiar and totally alien: the experience of feeling out of place grown more or less habitual.

  And it blended perfectly with the sense of disquiet that enveloped her as she prepared to meet the man who, only a few hours before, had probably been intending to murder Jim. But Jim was not there and the opportunity, whatever it was, was not to be missed. So she reminded herself that she was used to feeling apprehensive. She had been more uneasy about lesser things, so it wasn’t likely to kill her.

  It was a two-minute walk from the hotel, so Lisa was not surprised when she looked through the window and did not see Frank Rizza inside. Rizza would still be on his way. There was only the man behind the counter and one customer, a huge fat man who stood reading a newspaper.

  Her entrance was announced by a little bell that hung suspended over the doorway. The man behind the counter turned his head to look at her and then seemed to lose interest. The other man remained concealed behind his newspaper.

  She glanced around, as if trying to find some excuse for her presence. The back of the shop was covered with shelves of cardboard cigar boxes and large glass canisters of tobacco. There was a display of humidors and an umbrella stand filled with carved walking sticks, some of them very elaborate. There were several signed photographs on the wall, presumably of famous patrons. Lisa didn’t recognize any of them.

  “Can I help you, Miss?”

  It was the man behind the counter and his question sounded really more like a challenge, giving the impression that he knew she could only have found her way in here by some grotesque accident.

  The choice was, lie or tell the truth.

  “I’m supposed to meet someone here,” she said, which at least had the virtues of simplicity and directness. What was he going to do, ask her to leave?

  “And who might that be, Miss?”

  The question only surprised her for an instant. Of course—this was the sort of place where Frank Rizza would be a well-known and probably popular figure. He might have phoned ahead.

  The man with the newspaper folded it neatly and dropped it on the counter before turning to leave. Except that he did not leave. He passed out of sight behind her, but the little bell did not ring. He had not opened the door to go back outside.

  Lisa felt a sudden impulse to bolt, but there was no hope of that. The fat man was between her and the door.

  “My husband.” She forced herself to smile. “He has a birthday coming up . . .”

  There was a curtained entrance to some back room and now Frank Rizza was standing in it, staring at her with bored, appraising eyes.

  “That’s her,” he said.

  Alm
ost at once she felt the fat man slam into her, as if she had accidently backed into a wall. His hands closed over her elbows.

  “Quiet now,” he said. “Don’t make a fuss and nobody has to get hurt.”

  As if on signal, Frank Rizza stepped aside and she was propelled through the curtained doorway.

  Even in her surprise and fear, she could not help a certain sneaking admiration for the efficiency of the thing. They had allowed her no time to react. She was in the back room and then out in an alleyway and into a car. She couldn’t have described the room, she couldn’t have described the car—it all happened too quickly. She was on the back seat with Rizza to her right and the man who had been behind the counter to her left. The car doors slammed shut and the engine throbbed into life and still she had not opened her mouth.

  “Spare yourself the trouble, Miss,” Rizza was saying to her when the car began to move. “You’re not climbing out through the window and if you start screaming nobody’ll hear you. All you’ll buy yourself is enough pain to shut you up. Be a good girl and maybe we can have you home in time for dinner.”

  If Lisa had had any doubts about her fate, this was the moment when they disappeared. The hint of strain in Rizza’s voice told her everything. Besides, she had seen their faces. She was sitting in the back seat of their car—they weren’t even trying to conceal where they were taking her. She was never coming back. They were delivering her to death.

  Yet somehow this was just one more factor in the equation. She was surprised herself at her lack of fear, at the quiet that seemed to inhabit her. It was as if this were happening to someone else.

  She said nothing. Rizza was right. There was no escape and no point in making a fuss. Besides, if she was quiet they would begin to forget about her as a human being. She would become simply an object they were transporting from one place to another, and they would begin to relax. Then she might learn something, or they might make a mistake. It was her only chance.

  The fat man was driving and the car moved out into traffic with smooth, graceful speed. After a few sharp turns they were heading west.

  The man to her left was calm, as if he did this sort of thing every day, but Lisa did not even have to look at Rizza to realize that he was afraid. She could feel it in the tension of his body as he pressed against her on the back seat. What was there in all this to make Frank Rizza afraid?

  And then, of course, she knew. And her calm evaporated. She could feel terror fluttering in her chest like a trapped bird.

  Angel keeps threatening to put him in the gas chamber. He’s scared to death of her . . . I’ve seen the photographs of what she does to the Significant Others.

  . . . . .

  Angel had her reception prepared. Frank had stopped somewhere to phone, just to tell her that they were on their way. She could hear a lot of street traffic in the background, so she knew he was calling from San Francisco, which meant she had about half an hour’s warning. She didn’t need it.

  If only in the mind of its owner, every house has a focus point, some single feature around which its life seems to organize itself, and in Angel’s house that point was the fireplace. It was large in itself, but the stonework of which it formed the center took up one entire wall of the living room, which was almost the whole ground floor. It was a baronial fireplace, like something out of a medieval fortress, and on either side, fastened to the wall with bolts that looked like pieces of anchor chain, were two iron rings, each about eight inches in diameter. Beyond their questionable value as decoration, they served no detectible function, but they were the deciding factor in Angel’s decision to buy the house. She had looked at several up and down the coast, and the rings clinched it for her.

  If she ever needed to restrain someone, she had thought, those rings would do nicely. She had kept Charlie Accardo handcuffed to one for three days while he rubbed his wrists bloody trying to get free. Shackled to that rough stone wall in a house that was anyway as private as a dungeon, he might as well have been in the Bastille. Even he realized it after a time, and he had probably welcomed death.

  Charlie had been something of an experiment—not that Angel had had any doubts about the impossibility of escape. She was more curious about his reaction to the hopelessness of the situation, and what forms his despair was likely to take. He had given up surprisingly easily, and hardly struggled at all when she put the plastic bag over his head and sealed it shut around his neck with duct tape—there being so few ways to kill someone without leaving a mess on the carpet. Perhaps women were more tenacious of life. It would be interesting to see.

  And she had learned a lot about Frank Rizza in those three days. She had just let Charlie talk—after a while, when he somehow got the idea that he might have something he could trade for his life, it had proved almost impossible to shut him up. Charlie had really understood his boss.

  Angel stood in the middle of her living room, gazing at the stone fireplace as if it held the answer to some riddle. But there was no riddle. Everything of importance was known. Everything was ready. She was ready.

  The carpet under her bare feet was cool. The whole house was cool, even now, in the middle of summer. She was wearing a floor-length kimono and the green silk was pleasantly chilly everywhere it touched her skin.

  Frank Rizza hated her. She had made him afraid and he was humiliated by his fear, so of course he hated her. And, since he wasn’t very good at distinguishing between rage and lust, the best revenge he could imagine was sex. If she offered him the chance to climb on her belly and fuck her to death, he wouldn’t be able to resist it. She wouldn’t have to be subtle. He wouldn’t suspect anything. Rizza wasn’t the subtle type.

  She could hear the sound of automobile tires on the gravel driveway, so she went to the front door and opened it. The car was a dark blue Ford, two or three years old, and at first she could see only Rizza in the back and an immensely fat man in the driver’s seat. Then Rizza opened the back door and got out, and she saw the girl.

  She was smaller and not quite as pretty as one might have expected, which was a disappointment. She climbed out of the car as if her joints had gone stiff and then glanced at Angel, merely confirming an identification. Yes, of course. They had already met once today. She was the one from the hotel corridor, the one who had kept on walking past the door to Jim’s room.

  Another man, small and thin, opened the car door on the other side and stood speaking quietly to the fat man, who was still behind the wheel. They would be an added complication.

  “I hadn’t expected you to bring such a crowd,” she said to Rizza, letting just the slightest trace of flirtatiousness into her voice. He had the girl by the wrist, but his eyes were following the lines of Angel’s body as they were revealed by the green kimono.

  “They can wait outside if you like.”

  “No.” She shook her head and smiled. “Let them come in where they can look after their prisoner in comfort.”

  Then she turned and disappeared back inside the house.

  Rizza stood in the middle of the living room, looking around him like a tourist in a cathedral. Their relationship had changed. He had at last been admitted to the center of the shrine. One could so easily read the thoughts passing through his mind—he was really beginning to believe that he was about to break free of the net.

  Angel opened the drawer of a small table beside the staircase and took out a pair of handcuffs.

  “Use these,” she said, throwing them to Rizza. He caught them in both hands, the way a young boy catches a baseball. “Try the ring by the fireplace.”

  Then she smiled again, partly for effect and partly out of amusement at the hurry Frank was in to do her bidding.

  “There—good. Now she won’t get into mischief. Tell your friends to sit down and relax, Frank. I want to talk to you upstairs.”

  The staircase wound in a tight little curve and on the landing there were only two doors, one of which was open. Angel didn’t hurry. She made Rizza work to keep f
rom crowding into her. He was close enough behind that she could hear his breathing.

  Without looking back she passed through into her bedroom. When she turned around Rizza was standing in the open doorway.

  “It’s right there on the dresser, Frank,”” she said, pointing to a VCR tape on a black slipcover. “There aren’t any copies. Velma was fish food a long time ago.”

  He just glanced at the tape, as if to confirm its existence, and then seemed to lose interest in it. He had his freedom—now he wanted to punish her for having taken it away.

  She climbed up on the bed, near the headboard, and crouched down, her knees wide apart so that the kimono splayed open.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you, Frank? Why don’t you come over here and sit down?”

  He hesitated. For just a second or two, he hesitated. Maybe he had heard something somewhere that made him cautious, but in the end Frank Rizza was not a man to believe permanently that any woman was dangerous. At last he grinned, as if he knew he had won. And then he reached back to pull the door closed behind him.

  “Why don’t you come over here, Frank, and let me make it up to you.”

  He didn’t sit down immediately. He stood in front of her for a moment, at first very still, and then he put his hand into the opening of her kimono, taking hold of her breast. He wanted to squeeze, to hurt her, but he couldn’t quite nerve himself to do it.

  She put her hand on his arm and pulled him toward her.

  “Let me show you how nice I can be, Frank. Come—sit here next to me.”

  He sat down. She had positioned herself so that he sat facing away from her, back toward the door. She put her arms around him and kissed him on the neck. Then she began unbuttoning his shirt, at first with both hands and then with just the one. The other caressed his face for a moment and then reached back and slipped under the pillow.