Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  “Yes, all night if I feel like it. Mrs. Wyman won’t be heard from again until morning, and the servants are forbidden the garden.”

  “What about the groundskeeper?”

  “Dominic?” She laughed. It was the most delicious sound he had ever heard. “Dominic spends his evenings watching television and drinking bourbon. The drunker he gets the more he turns the volume up. We don’t have to worry about him.”

  It didn’t occur to him to wonder how she would know that, because by now she was standing directly in front of him, close enough that he could feel the hem of her skirt brushing against his trouser legs. She put her arms around his neck.

  “Don’t you want to kiss me?”

  That was how it began, all those years ago. It didn’t last very long, and then she disappeared like smoke.

  He was in love. He was so desperately in love that he had to tell someone, so he told his father. He didn’t expect anything to come of that—he had a right to be in love if he wanted to be.

  But his father had looked very grave.

  “When have you been meeting her?” he asked. “I take it that Mrs. Wyman knows nothing about this.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, she shall have to know before you see this girl again.”

  “Isn’t that between her and Angel?”

  The name caused something to change in Mr. Kinkaid’s face—it was faint, but it was there. Suddenly he was almost angry.

  “She’s only sixteen, Jimmy. And she’s a Wyman. She isn’t pregnant, is she?”

  “No, of course not!” He felt his face go hot. “We haven’t . . . I mean, it hasn’t come to that yet.”

  And now he felt like a fool. What had he expected? Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut?

  Because he had always trusted his father, that was why. But now the man before him seemed almost a stranger.

  “Well, in any case we can’t have you sneaking around. I’ll speak to Mrs. Wyman and we’ll see what can be done.”

  “Why does anything have to be done, for Christ’s sake”

  He never got an answer, and he never saw Angel again. His father went up to see Mrs. Wyman, and Mrs. Wyman packed her off.

  And ten years later Kinkaid could find no trace of her. He looked through the whole house, from which after that night she had simply vanished, but he found nothing to suggest that she had ever lived there, that indeed she had ever lived anywhere except in his memory. Mrs. Wyman was dead, and her daughter was dead and buried somewhere in Europe. Old Judge Wyman’s brother had been dead for seventy-five years. And Angel, it seemed, was a less real presence here than any of them.

  He retraced his steps to the entrance and let himself out, locking the door behind him. Outside the raw summer sunlight hit him like a blow, making him wince, and all at once he felt a clutching pain in his chest. At any other time he might have wondered if he was having a heart attack, but he knew it wasn’t that. It was those ten years having their revenge. He should never have come back here.

  Finally, when the impression had passed off a little and he no longer felt in any danger of losing control, he followed the flagstone walkway around to the back of the house. There was the garden, which he suddenly realized he had never seen in daylight, and in its center the little gazebo.

  As he approached it he saw someone, a girl, waiting inside. She turned her head—had she had been waiting all this time . . .

  She was Lisa Milano, from the real estate office. She was dark and pixyish, not anything like Angel. The confusion had lasted no more than an instant. It was a trick of the light, and of his own longings, nothing more.

  Then she smiled at him and Kinkaid felt as if he had never really noticed her before.

  “I wonder,” he said, a little surprised at the sound of his own voice, “if you might care to have some dinner with me tonight.”

  10

  Dinner was a big success. They drove to Pound Ridge, which was in the middle of nowhere, and ate at a obscenely expensive French restaurant where the floors were uneven and the lighting dim but the desserts were beyond praise.

  Lisa Milano wore a sleeveless, green silk dress. It was a good color for her, particularly by candlelight, and she had very pretty, well formed arms. She listened with amusement to all his stories and then, when the meal was over, invited him back to her apartment, where she proceeded to seduce him. It had been a long time for Kinkaid, and the morning’s visit to Five Miles had put him in a susceptible frame of mind, so he didn’t put up too much of a struggle.

  The apartment was in a huge, uncouth modern building directly across the street from the Stamford Hospital. She stood very close to him in the elevator. She never spoke a word. She just let her nearness work on his frazzled nervous system. Once she glanced up at him and smiled, but that was just before the bell sounded for her floor so he had no opportunity to put any interpretation on it.

  She disappeared into the kitchen. The living room, where he had been left marooned, was small and haphazardly furnished, as if the life lived here was something that had had to be assembled on the run, but the overall impression was individual and pleasing. Miss Milano liked dark, lavish colors. The purple of the sofa was almost orgiastic.

  After a few minutes she brought back a tray with two cups and a china tea service, complete with silver tongs for the tiny cubes of sugar. When she set the tray on the table, the same table he had been trying of keep from banging his shins against, and sat down beside him, close enough that if he moved at all he could hardly avoid touching her.

  “I can’t drink coffee this late,” she said, in the manner of someone admitting to a serious weakness of character. “I hope you don’t mind tea.”

  “Tea’s fine. I’ve never been a coffee drinker.”

  “That’s lucky then.”

  She turned to him and smiled, and as she turned her bare shoulder brushed against his coat sleeve, which made him feel as if he had been jolted awake. Were they really having this conversation? She wore her short black hair swept back, revealing cute ears. Kinkaid wondered if the fact that he liked her ears so much meant there was anything odd about him.

  She poured a few drops of milk into his tea, no sugar, and handed him the cup. She didn’t ask. She just did it. Had she remembered from the restaurant, or was he just manifestly the type? And was that good or bad?

  She took two lumps of sugar and no milk. It was suddenly obvious that that was precisely how every woman should have her tea. She stirred slowly. Just watching her move was an almost sensual pleasure.

  Their conversation was the usual nonsense. Little Known Tea Facts. Adventures in Dining Out, Volume II. Pros and Cons of Life in Philadelphia. They weren’t really talking about any of these things. The verbal dance wasn’t patterned around its words.

  Finally she put her tea cut down and turned toward him. One of her small breasts brushed against his arm. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even smile. But her face was so close to his, and the invitation so clear, that it would have been ungentlemanly not to respond.

  So he responded. He let his hand caress the back of her head and then drew her in for a kiss. Which is when the firworks started.

  Kinkaid was never sure quite how it happened, but suddenly they were all over each other. It was pretty disorderly. There seemed to be no time to take their clothes off. They were flat out on the sofa and he was fumbling with the back of Lisa’s dress while she was busy unhooking his belt and running down his zipper. When they came together it was rather like having a heart attack—very sudden and furious and completely out of control. Except that it was marvelous. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared him for this.

  When it was over, and he was lying on top of her with her legs locked around his waist, he felt like he should be exhausted except that he wasn’t. He felt great.

  She was looking up at him with an astonished expression, exactly as if she were about to burst out laughing from pure exultation. Her cheeks were burn
ing and, Lord love her, she was flushed pink right down to her nipples.

  “There’s a bed in my bedroom,” she said.

  “Is that why you call it your bedroom?”

  “Yes. You want to go there?”

  “Yes.”

  He kissed her and felt her tongue slide between his lips. It was a few minutes before he could summon the discipline to climb off her, and then he had to wriggle out of his trousers, which were bunched up somewhere around his knees. Finally he was able to reach down and cradle her in his arms. He carried her down the hall to the bedroom. She kept kissing him as if she were starving.

  The second time, in bed, in the dark, with all their clothes off, was even better. Now they had the leisure to enjoy it.

  It was odd, but he never seemed to get tired.

  About three-thirty in the morning he started to hunt around for his shoes.

  “I was hoping you’d . . .”

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and when he turned around to look at her he saw how she reflexively pulled the sheet up to cover herself. He had to be careful or he would spoil everything.

  “I really don’t want to go.”

  “Then don’t.”

  She reached out and switched on the little reading lamp on her night table. The harsh white light made everything very stark.

  “This is going to sound stupid,” he said. “I have a housekeeper who thinks I’m still nine years old.”

  “You’re right. That does sound stupid.” Yet there was that in her voice which suggested she might be prepared not to hold it against him. “Will she be waiting up for you?”

  “It isn’t that bad.”

  He forgot about his shoes and crawled back into the bed. Her arms went around his neck. Their lips just touched. This time it wasn’t sex, it was something else.

  “If I’m not there for breakfast, she’ll worry,” he went on. “She won’t say anything, but she’ll worry. She’s been in a bad way since my father’s death.”

  “Was she in love with him?”

  “I don’t think so—at least, not that way. She’s in love with the family.”

  “And now you’re all that’s left.”

  “I’m it.”

  “Okay.” She let go of him suddenly enough that it felt almost as if she were pushing him away. “I understand. You have to go home.”

  She was angry. Maybe she didn’t want to be, but she was.

  “Can I see you again?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, ‘why?’ Isn’t it obvious?”

  “I don’t do this all the time, you know.”

  She rolled over, turning her back on him. Okay, he couldn’t blame her. She had given him everything she had, and now he was making her feel cheap.

  He put his arms around her and kissed her on the shoulder. She didn’t respond, but she also didn’t resist.

  “I don’t do this all the time either. So what do you suppose that means?”

  He kissed her again, this time on the neck, and this time she felt a little more pliant.

  “So can I see you again?” he asked a second time. “You set the rules. I just want to be with you. How about dinner tomorrow night? How about lunch first and then dinner? We can have dinner and go to a movie, and I’ll bring you straight home and kiss you chastely at your front door. I’ll never touch you below the collar bone.”

  She turned back toward him and she was smiling. Everything was all right again.

  “Now what would be the fun of that?” she asked.

  . . . . .

  That morning he skipped his run and slept until seven-thirty. When he caught himself whistling in the shower he burst out laughing from pure exultation of spirit. It seemed he had a girlfriend. What a surprise.

  He kept smiling all during breakfast. Julia looked at him as if she thought he had gone mad.

  Out of self-defense he hid himself in his office. After a while work sobered him up.

  At ten minutes after ten he received a phone call from Eric Tollison.

  “I wonder if you could manage a little something for us,” he said. “It’s a routine matter, but the billing will be substantial. Can you be in Denver Monday afternoon?”

  Kinkaid glanced at his desk calendar to remind himself of what he already knew—that today was Thursday, which meant he would have a maximum of three days to prep.

  “How routine and how substantial?”

  “Dissolution of a partnership. A touch acrimonious, which is why I thought of you. It’s worth a good two hundred and fifty an hour, but we need to clean this up quickly.”

  “So what do you want me to do, break somebody’s legs?”

  “It’ll be enough if you just scare the shit out of him. I’ll fax you a copy of the paperwork.”

  Kinkaid hung up the phone, wondering if he shouldn’t feel insulted. Tollison made him sound like a kind of judicial thug. Was that how they thought of him, this gun for hire? He found the idea rather distasteful.

  Of course his apparent standing with Karskadon and Henderson didn’t depress him nearly as much as the fact that now he would have to spend Sunday afternoon on a plane rather than tucked in with Lisa Milano.

  Twenty minutes later pages of a brief entitled “Fox vs. Palmer” began pouring out of his laser printer. They seemed endless.

  He met Lisa for lunch at a Chinese place in Stamford called The Golden Cod. It didn’t sound very hopeful.

  “You look beautiful,” he said when he met her outside the restaurant. And she really did. She seemed to glow. He felt like a man saying goodbye to all earthly happiness.

  They went inside and were seated against the wall, with just a decorative screen separating them from the kitchen. It was Kinkaid’s fate in life never to be given a good table. Maître d’s seemed to hate him on sight. The dining room was nearly empty.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You’re glaring at the menu. If you don’t like Chinese, all you had to do was say so.”

  “I like Chinese.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I have to go to Denver on Monday.”

  “So? What have you got against Denver?”

  “There’s a telephone book of stuff I have to get through before I leave—it all just dropped out of the sky this morning.”

  “So you’ll be pretty busy.”

  “Looks like it.” He risked a glance at her, wondering if he wasn’t making a big mistake. “I’ll be back Wednesday or Thursday.”

  “I’m not your keeper,” she answered, without actually looking at him.

  “No, but the timing is terrible. We seem to have a promising little romance here. I just hope it’ll keep for a week.”

  “I suppose so.” There was just a touch of mischief in her voice. “In the meantime, let me know if you need a study break.”

  . . . . .

  The mail was waiting when he got back to the office. It was in a pile on his desk. After the death of the Elder Kinkaid, Molly had stopped sorting it. Among the letters was a plain white envelope with “Four Star Clipping Service” rubber stamped in the upper left-hand corner.

  Kinkaid stared at it for about a second and a half before he remembered. It had been days since he had even thought about this little mystery. He didn’t want to think about it now.

  He opened the envelope and found a clipping from the Atlanta Register dated five days earlier and headlined “Local Man Missing After Family Murdered”.

  It was about George Tipton. Not the George Tipton, of course—he was safely dead and buried in New Jersey. This one was only missing, along with his car. His wife and six-month-old daughter had been found dead in their home by Mrs. Tipton’s mother. Most of the story, in fact, consisted of an interview with the mother, which meant that the police weren’t giving out very much information. George was wanted for questioning.

  As he read through the story, which went on for two columns, Kinkaid experienced a mingling of grief and horror that was almo
st indistinguishable from nausea. He felt as if somehow he had as good as murdered these people—that George Tipton would never be found, that he was dead somewhere, it never occurred to him to doubt—yet he was unable to identify anything he could have done to prevent their deaths. He had informed the police. They had not been interested.

  “All you’ve got is a list of names,” they had said. “That doesn’t help us. We would need some common denominator. A pattern somewhere. Call us again if you find one.”

  They probably thought he was a nut.

  And maybe they were right. After all, maybe the clipping referred to the wrong George Tipton—how many George Tiptons were there in the wide world? Probably hundreds. Maybe the whole thing was just random, some kind of statistical quirk . . .

  No, that didn’t make any sense. Besides, having a George Tipton in the files was just too big a coincidence to swallow whole.

  And then there was the evidence of James Kinkaid III, senior partner in the firm, who had died of cardiac arrest after reading about Stephen Billinger’s murder. He had seen a pattern in all this.

  So it all came back to the same three things: a list of names, a small-town law practice, and a string of murders. The first two were keys to the third.

  And, unlike Karskadon and Henderson, a small-town law practice doesn’t specialize. It covers everything—probates, divorces, trust agreements, real-estate sales, commercial law, civil damages, even the odd penny-ante criminal case.

  Which meant that the next step was obvious.

  New Gilead had a police force of about twenty, most of whom were assigned to traffic or administration. They were presided over by the town marshal, Bill Cheffins, who had held the job for as long as anyone could remember. It was his day off, so Kinkaid phoned him at home.

  “Am I interrupting anything?”

  “I’m painting the kitchen,” Cheffins answered, “Basic training for retirement. So don’t worry, Jim Boy, I don’t mind a little distraction.”

  “Under those circumstances, could you do me a favor?”

  “Does it need doing today?”

  “No.”

  “Damn. What is it, then?”