“Yes.” There was a coldness in the word, a sense of grievance that went beyond anger. “Yes, he did interfere. He said things about me, things he didn’t have a right to say.”
Because they weren’t true? Or because they were? Did it matter to her, or could she even see the difference?
Angel let her gaze wander about the room a bit, until it came to rest on the dead fat man who was curled up just beside her foot. The hole in the back of his skull was as large as a woman’s fist and its edges were spattered with a dull, coagulated liquid that no longer even looked like blood. He was so dead that it was difficult to believe he could ever have been alive. But Angel stared at him with passionate hatred, as if she wished she could will him back to life just to have the satisfaction of killing him again.
“I never met him. Jim’s father—I never met him.”
There was no response. Angel wasn’t listening. In the wide world there was only her and the dead man on the floor.
“I want to go home,” she said at last. Then she turned her attention back to Lisa and smiled, perhaps a little pityingly. “I lived at Five Mile once, with my Grandmother. If your name is Wyman, it’s where you belong.”
“It’s been sold.”
“I know. I bought it. How did you know it’s been sold?”
There was a certain edge in the question, suggesting that the wrong answer could lead anywhere, but then Lisa remembered the obvious answer.
“I’m a real-estate broker. A property like that sells, everyone in the business hears about it.”
“Oh yes.” Angel nodded, apparently satisfied, dismissing the reason as unimportant. “My mother grew up there, and she never wanted to go back. Can you imagine that? She wanted to stay in Paris with her men friends.”
She looked down again at the corpse, only this time the hatred had shaded off into contempt.
“Did this animal try to take advantage? No? But he would have gotten around to it eventually. I know the type. The more repulsive they are the more trouble they have keeping their hands to themselves. If he were alive I’d cut his fingers off. A joint at a time. I’d trim him smooth all over.”
She stood up again, taking the gun from the coffee table. Then she turned to face Lisa and, without the slightest trace of malice or even irony, she smiled.
“You’ll excuse me now. I have to make a telephone call.”
When Angel was gone, Lisa simply let go. She crouched by the wall and sobbed, clutching at the great iron ring as if it were her only safety as panic seemed to wash through her in waves.
But at last she was quiet. She felt wrung out, too despairing even to be afraid anymore. Angel was going to kill her—she knew this. She was going to die. But somehow this was less dreadful than the thought that that woman might any second come back into the room. Angel Wyman inspired a fear that was greater even than the fear of death. It was fear that began and ended with itself, abstract and pure.
She almost envied the two dead men who kept her company in the silent room. The little one was partially obscured by the coffee table, just a pair of legs and an arm thrown out at an odd angle, so that he might have been a tailor’s dummy rather than a human being, but the other one, with his shattered head pointing toward the staircase, was there for her inspection. She could see his left ear and the puckering of flesh where his shirt collar pulled tight around his fat neck. She could see the watchband on his wrist and the permanent press creases that ran all the way up the backs of his trouser legs. She could see . . .
She had no idea how long she was staring at him before she was conscious of something odd in his appearance. It was his leg—his left one, to be precise. It didn’t look right.
She studied the leg for quite a while before she figured out what it was. The material of his trousers didn’t hang right. It was as if there was some kind of lump on the inside of his left calf. She couldn’t imagine why, under the circumstances, this fact should have the slightest significance for her, but somehow it seemed vitally important.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
Angel had come back into the living room. She was dressed in a pair of white linen trousers and a knitted top of the palest blue, and she was carrying a small brown handbag, which meant that she was going out.
“Please let me go to the bathroom,” Lisa said, letting her voice break a little with a desperation she didn’t have to fake. “I don’t want to make a mess here with these two guys on the floor.”
“I doubt if it would matter to them, but I understand.”
Once more Angel smiled her terrible smile, the gracious hostess in the House of the Dead, and Lisa saw she had been right. This bitch was an instinctive predator, but give her a chance to play the woman-to-woman game and she got distracted. It was as if the effort of trying to be human for even a few seconds took her full concentration.
And that was fine, because Lisa didn’t want her to start reading her mind. She didn’t want her attention drawn to the odd lump under the fat man’s left trouser leg.
Angel took a small silver key from her handbag and held it up for Lisa to see.
“I’ll unlock you,” she said, her old self again. “I’ll even let you have a little privacy in the toilet. And if you act up I’ll hurt you. And I mean I’ll hurt you. Just now you’re more useful to me alive, but I wouldn’t presume very much on that if I were you.”
Even as one handcuff bracelet sprang open she took Lisa’s right hand and bent it at the wrist so there was no choice but to let the elbow lock straight. One twist sent a spasm of pain all the way up into her chest.
“That’s just a taste,” Angel murmured into her ear. “If you want me to cripple you, all you have to do is give me a reason.”
Without releasing her hold, she half walked half dragged Lisa down a short corridor and opened the door to a tiny, windowless room containing nothing but a sink and a toilet. There she snapped the bracelet to the towel bar.
“I’ll give you two minutes.”
Two minutes. And you’re dying to pee, so you do that first. How much time does that leave you? How much time do you need in a room almost as bare as when the builder finished with it. Aside from a small circular rug on the floor and a roll of toilet paper in the wall niche, there was nothing. There wasn’t even a towel. Lisa ventured a peek in the medicine cabinet, but of course it was empty.
She thought about the toilet tank, but she knew she couldn’t get the lid off one handed without making a noise that would bring Angel right straight back in through the door. She checked the underside of the rug—maybe it was coming unraveled and she could steal a few feet of thread. No such luck.
Then she remembered the toilet paper. Or, more accurately, she remembered the rod that was holding it in the wall niche. Those things were usually two tubes of metal, one of which slipped into the other, and there was a spring inside to maintain the tension. The spring might be worth having.
She got it out easily enough, and managed to put the toilet paper back on the rod, and the rod pulled out enough that it would stay in its two little holes provided nobody touched it. But then where was she going to hide the spring?
Well hell, it didn’t have to stay a spring. She pulled the wire as straight as she could and then looped it a couple of times around her waist, dropping her skirt over it just as Angel gave two quick knocks on the door and then opened it.
There was no conversation. Angel grabbed hold of her free arm, pinned it behind Lisa’s back, and then unlocked the handcuff bracelet from the towel bar. In fifteen seconds they were down the corridor again and the handcuff chain went back through the iron ring beside the fireplace.
“I’ll be leaving now,” Angel said, picking up her handbag from the coffee table. She took out a small black object, just a trifle too large to be a compact, and put it on a narrow stone shelf above the fireplace, where Lisa would be able to reach it.
“When you open that thing you’ll find it’s a telephone. But don’t get your hopes up—it�
��s on receive only. I’ve disabled the call button.”
“Then why . . ?”
“You’ll find that out when somebody gives you a ring.”
She seemed ready to laugh, like a teenager talking about a surprise party. None of this is real to her, Lisa thought. It’s just some kind of weird game. We all might as well be paper dolls.
“I’ll see you later. Right now I have a date.”
38
“Is it her?”
Covering the mouthpiece of the receiver with his fingers, Kinkaid replied to Pratt’s whispered question with the faintest of nods.
“Yes, Angel, I recognized your voice right away,” he said, in a tone that almost managed to be chatty. “It’s been a long time.”
There was a pause, lasting fifteen or twenty seconds, during which the veins in Kinkaid’s neck began to stand out like cords.
“Yes—I understand . . . Yes.”
Pratt would have given a fair chunk of his pension to listen in on that interesting dialogue. He even checked the bathroom for an extension, but it appeared the St. Francis had not as yet yielded to that particular luxury. So he was forced to go back and read the progress of the conversation as it registered in Kinkaid’s face.
“Angel, let me talk to her. I want . . . Yes. Okay. Yes, if . . .”
At the outside the call lasted four minutes, but it seemed to go on forever. And the accumulating strain on Kinkaid, as he sat on the edge of the bed listening to that maniac, was something you could almost measure.
And then, all at once, it was over. Without a word Kinkaid replaced the receiver and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees as he stared at nothing over his folded hands. He was wound so tight it was at least an even bet that he was not even breathing.
“She’s got Lisa,” he said finally. “If I want her back I have to come to her.”
“She won’t give her back. You know that.”
“I know.”
In that instant Pratt would have liked to have found some word of hope or encouragement, but there was none. And no place for comforting lies either, because James Kinkaid, Esq., was not the type to take solace in fantasies. His pain, as he contemplated the narrow choices open to him, was almost unbearable to watch.
And then, thank God, the homicide lieutenant from Dayton remembered that he was working a case.
“I want you to tell me, word for word, everything she said.”
Kinkaid glanced up at him for a bewildered moment and then seemed to reach for some sort inner control.
“There isn’t time,” he answered, without yet rising from the bed.
“Make time, Jim. I need to know.”
“Yes—I suppose so.” He ground the heel of his hand against his forehead, as if trying to erase something there, and then grew very still. For perhaps as long as ten seconds he seemed perfectly insensible. Then a faint shudder passed over him, and he came back to life.
“She told me to go to the front entrance of the hotel, that a car would be waiting for me there.”
“What kind of a car? A taxi? A limousine? Will she pick you up? What?”
“She didn’t say.” Kinkaid’s eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to bring the car into focus. “She wouldn’t be fool enough to come herself, so she’ll either send a driver or it’ll be a rental.”
“If it’s a rental, how will you know where to drive it?”
“‘I’ll be in touch.’ That’s what she said—‘I’ll be in touch.’ Not ‘You’ll hear from me,’ but ‘I’ll be in touch.’ The car will have a phone.”
“It could still be a limousine.”
“No—a rental car would be safer. She’ll want to keep me isolated as much as possible. A driver would be too big a risk.”
Pratt considered the idea for a moment and decided Kinkaid was probably right. A rental could be delivered and the keys left with the doorman. She might even have arranged it through the hotel. A rental was the smart choice and, whatever else she might be, Angel Wyman had so far shown no signs of being stupid.
“Have you got a local map?”
“In the top drawer of the desk. I bought it yesterday when we . . .” He seemed to lose interest in the sentence.
It was a sheet map, folded up to about the size of a Number 10 envelope. Pratt spread it out on the bed.
“She’ll want to get you out of the city,” he said. “She’s broken cover to arrange all this, so it must mean a lot of her. She’ll want to talk, to show off—she’ll have something to prove. She’ll want privacy. What do you get if you take the road south from here?”
“God knows. Suburbs, I guess.”
“I like the bridges better.” Pratt snapped the line tracing of the Bay Bridge with his fingertip, making the paper rustle. “She’ll lead you around by the nose for a while, just to satisfy herself you aren’t being followed, but the bridges have a lot of advantages for her. She can drop in right behind you without attracting any attention. Wherever you end up, there’s a good chance she’ll take you across one or the other.”
“Why should she imagine I’m being followed? She isn’t giving me time to bring in the police, and there’s no reason to imagine she knows anything about you.”
“She’s got Lisa,” Pratt reminded him gently. “She’s had her for maybe a couple of hours. We have to assume she knows whatever Lisa knows.”
“Yes. I see.”
Kinkaid stood up and, like a man leaving the house to go to work in the morning, calmly started checking the contents of his pockets. He looked as if he had only one decision left to make in this life, and he had made it.
“I’d better go now,” he said. “The car will be waiting.”
“You know she may already have killed Lisa by now,” Pratt told him, more for form’s sake than anything.
“Yes, I know that.”
“And she certainly means to kill you—don’t imagine she’s the sentimental type.”
“No. I wasn’t imagining that. But she isn’t giving me any choice, is she.”
“Then at least take this.”
Pratt reached under his coat and took out the .38 police special he had carried for twenty-five years, but Kinkaid only smiled as if at some sad joke and shook his head.
“I’ve never even held one,” he said. “And I don’t think I could bring myself to use it. Besides, she’ll be looking for something like that.”
His briefcase was standing open on the desk. He peered into it for a moment and then extracted a flat, square object about the size of a hip flask. It was a tape recorder.
“But she may not be looking for this.” Kinkaid clicked a button and produced a faint whirring sound. “The pocket secretary, every lawyer’s friend. You can get about an hour on a tape. I’ll hide it under the seat, so if you find the car you might learn something worth knowing.”
He slid it into his shirt pocket.
They rode down in the elevator together without exchanging a syllable. As they walked across the vast lobby, almost empty on a Sunday afternoon, Pratt touched the other man on the arm.
“Let me go out first,” he said. “Give me ten seconds and then follow, but once through those doors you don’t know me. I want to get the car’s make and license number and then I’ll get on the horn to the Bureau.
“One more thing—if she does send you over a bridge make sure to go through the toll booth on the extreme left side. Maybe, if there’s time, I can get a homing device planted on your car.”
Kinkaid nodded, as if he hadn’t really been listening, and then took Pratt’s hand.
“Thanks for everything,” he said.
. . . . .
When he came out into the bright summer sunlight, Kinkaid could not quite dismiss the suspicion that all of this was not really happening to him. He found it strangely hard to imagine that Angel Wyman was anything more than a bad memory, that he wasn’t on his way to meet Lisa in some tourist trap where the worst fate they could expect was a mediocre dinner. He wasn’t the dramat
ic type, he told himself. He was the type who died in bed, with his insurance premiums fully paid up.
This illusion of safety lasted right up until he saw the short, squat man wearing a bill cap with a Capital Car Rentals patch on the brow as he stood next to a chocolate brown Jaguar with a high gloss polish—apparently Angel thought her old beau’s last ride should be a class affair.
“Are you waiting for me?” he asked, smiling pleasantly at the man, who after all didn’t know he was officiating at a funeral.
“Mr. Kinkaid? Yes. Could I just see your driver’s license?”
Sure enough, the car had a phone. It rang almost as soon as Kinkaid had pulled out into traffic.
“Turn right onto Geary,” Angel told him. “And, yes, I’m close enough that you might see me if you turned your head, although I wouldn’t advise it. I also wouldn’t advise you to make any calls. I’ll be dialing your number every fifteen or twenty seconds, and if I ever get a busy signal your little friend will step off into oblivion. Do we understand each other, Jim?”
“No, and I don’t think we ever did. But I take your point. I won’t be on the phone to anyone except you.”
“Good boy. If it rings three times, you pick up. Three rings means I want to talk to you.”
And then, abruptly, Kinkaid found himself listening to a dial tone. He put the receiver back on its cradle, where it snapped into place, and surrendered himself to the traffic on Geary Street.
. . . . .
After noting the car’s description and license number, along with the sticker on the left rear window that declared it the property of Capital Car Rentals, Pratt watched it disappear around the corner, wondering if he would ever see the driver again, alive or dead.
She’s playing with us, he thought. She puts Kinkaid in a conspicuous luxury car as if daring anyone to follow. His own private theory was that Angel knew Kinkaid was in contact with the police and didn’t give a damn. She had made her plans, and any surveillance they tried to run would turn out to be a waste of time. And the Jaguar was her way of rubbing it in.
This was just a game to her, the clever bitch.
Angel Page 34
