He waited, his head cocked a little to one side, for his hypothesis to be confirmed or denied, but Kinkaid merely smiled.
“A little before my time,” he said. “You might be right for all I know.”
“You know, Mr. Kinkaid.”
“Then tell me something I don’t know. Tell me what you saw that last night.”
. . . . .
His suitcase was in the trunk of his car and he had checked out of his motel room. In half an hour James Kinkaid would be on his way back to Connecticut, but he had one more call to make before he left Sherman’s Crest.
“She passed directly underneath my window,” Jimmy Carfax had said. “There are just two places she could have picked to go over the fence, both well the other side from the main entrance, and my room faces the front. I was rather flattered that she went so far out of her way for little old me. She even looked up, just to be sure I was there.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Because she needed a credible witness—after all, I’m not crazy. And she knew I wouldn’t be inconveniently eager to tattle on her.”
Naturally not. After all, the escape would lose its entertainment value too quickly if Angel didn’t get a good running start.
“So the next question is, why should she want a witness, credible or otherwise?”
“Because someone had to see the coat, dear boy.”
And thus a mystery attached itself to the beginning of Angel’s last journey, because Jimmy would say no more. He lapsed into an amused silence, leaving his visitor to figure the rest out for himself.
But it was the end of that journey with which Kinkaid felt he had now to come to terms, so his final stop was the hospital’s cemetery.
“You won’t have any trouble finding it,” the groundskeeper had told him. “All the graves have markers and we lay them out in order. If you know when she died you’ll find her.”
The cemetery was almost half a mile from the main building. You followed a narrow gravel road that led nowhere else and you came to a low stone wall surrounding an area about half the size of a football field but sloping gently downward. The grass had been cut recently but, judging from the length of the clipping that had been left scattered about, this was not something that happened more than three or four times in a summer.
The earliest graves, dating from the late 1870s and, in some cases, marked with impressive granite headstones, were near the entrance and revealed no particular pattern. Order, it seemed, began with the new century. Thereafter it was possible to chart a rough history of Sherman’s Crest.
In May of 1905 there had been an epidemic of some sort—Kinkaid found no less than twenty-two graves dating from that month. Judging from the number of burials, the ‘20s must have been a high tide in the hospital’s fortunes, but the ‘30s were correspondingly lean. The ‘40s and ‘50s seemed to stretch on forever, but after about 1960 the cemetery population began thinning out. Perhaps the inmates’ families started bringing their dead home for burial, or perhaps it was due to improvements in treatment. It was just as well, because the markers ran to within twenty or thirty feet of the far wall.
The graves of the last few decades were forlorn affairs, most of them consisting of no more than a low stone, no bigger than a brick, with a brass plate bolted to it. Angel’s was one of these.
He knelt down beside the tiny marker and with his fingertips brushed away the grass clippings from its inscription. “Angela Wyman” it read—she would have been just twenty.
Except that Jimmy Carfax had been right. She had meant him to see the coat. She had intended it to be found, when they would need so broad a hint as that so help them identify the body buried here. Because, whoever she was who occupied this grave, she was not Angela Wyman.
21
Freddie Ju had eaten lunch at Curly’s two days running, and he was afraid Cheffins was beginning to notice him. This town made him nervous. It was too small and full up with fucking Caucs, so that even in his Con Ed uniform, which in the City just about made him invisible, he stood out like a fucking hard-on. The shit you had to do to get a little ahead in this life.
It was a straightforward enough job—assuming there was ever anything straightforward about topping a bull—and he was almost home. Someone else had been here ahead of him to check out the mark’s habits, so all Freddie had to do was a quick double-check, then whack the guy and then climb on the bus back to New York. It would be all over by rush hour, but he just didn’t like the way this backwoods doughnut had eye-fucked him coming in through the door.
I got you made, kid, that look had said. I know all about you. It wasn’t anything new to get braced up by a cop. You just didn’t expect to get made that fast out here in Frog Hollow. It was a little unsettling.
Or maybe Matt Dillon didn’t much like Asians. Like there was some fucking line drawn through White Plains and the nice citizens of New Gilead expected to leave all that ethnic shit behind them when they got on the commuter train. Freddie thought he could deal with that. In a way it was safer if the guy was just your average bigot, and Freddie would have the pleasure of returning the compliment when he blew the fucker’s head off.
Of course there was the owner. Curly was a gook in a white apron who brought his customers their food on a pewter tray and engaged them in light banter as he cleared away the dirty dishes. That, apparently, was okay. Gooks were supposed to be cooks, just like niggers could be musicians. Just sit on the wrong side of the counter, though, and you got funny looks from John Law.
Well, John Law was about to get his fucking toupee shot off.
It helped, Freddie had to admit. It helped that he could hate the guy, even if it was just a little. This would be the first time he had ever offed anybody and he was scared. Not scared that he wouldn’t be able to do it, or even that he might get caught. He had a good plan and you could get away with anything if you had a good plan. He was just scared in general.
He figured it would pass off once he got going.
It would have to. This was a big career move. This would open a lot of doors if he didn’t mess it up.
He had taken the call at his girlfriend’s.
“It’s for you,” she had said, and then got out of bed and danced her round little ass into the bathroom so he could be alone with the phone—an unnecessary precaution as it turned out, because Connie wouldn’t have understood a word. Connie was her stage name. She was a Korean hooker, and Freddie’s friends didn’t really approve. Even a Cauc would have been better.
“Do you know who this is?” the voice asked in Cantonese. Not your second-generation pidgen, but the real thing.
“Yes.”
“Then if you can spare the time from your whore, come down here.”
Three minutes later he was dressed and out on the street. He never even said goodbye to Connie.
He knew where to go, just like he knew the voice on the phone. It was showtime.
Mother Ting’s was a tea shop down on Mott Street. The tea shop was cover for the gambling up on the second story, which in turn was cover for the narcotics business that was conducted one floor above that. People with the right connections still did a big business in crack, even if everyone said the future belonged to the designer drugs. Until now they had only used Freddie as a mule, but you didn’t get a call from Mr. Quong if the only place you were going was the Eighth Avenue bus terminal.
Freddie did not know what he had expected when he climbed the stairs to the third floor, but what he found was a narrow corridor, the floor covered with green linoleum tiles, some of which were beginning to curl at the edges. All the doors along both sides were closed with that finality suggestive of heavy deadbolt locks—all of them except one, which was open about half an inch, just enough to throw a sliver of yellowish light across the wall.
“Come!” a voice commanded in response to his tentative knock. It was the same voice he had heard over the phone.
“Come in, God dammit,” Mr. Quong said, in
English, perhaps only to prove that he could. “Come in, and close the fucking door.”
He was sitting behind his desk, a small, squat figure in his shirtsleeves, his tie undone, a pair of square-framed reading glasses pushed up into his slicked-back gray and black hair. He was probably about sixty, with a bulldog face and slightly protruding eyes that made him look like a Chinese J. Edgar Hoover. His hands, the nails of which glistened, were pressed palms down against the ink blotter, as if he were about to push himself up.
“You picked up bad habits running with the Dragons.” He shook his head, which suddenly looked as big as a pumpkin. “You boys did some bad shit.”
Freddie said nothing. He wouldn’t have known what to say. The whir from the rotating fan on top of one of the filing cabinets seemed to fill the tiny room.
“You see those guys anymore?” Mr. Quong asked, a note of wariness having crept into his voice.
“Not for a while,” Freddie was at last able to answer. “I see them around—you know. It was just kid stuff.”
“Kid stuff. You bet.” Mr. Quong nodded, as if he liked that answer. “Gouging protection money from the grocery stores down on Mulberry Street. Lots of rough stuff without much payoff. Kid stuff. And now you run crack for me. I guess maybe you’re looking to move up in the world.”
Freddie started to say something and then thought better of it—or, more accurately, he simply lost his nerve. This made Mr. Quong smile. If anything, his smile was even more terrible than his suspicion.
“That’s okay, kid,” he said. “Nothing wrong with a little ambition. I got a job for you if you feel up to it, something to oblige the friend of a friend. It’s all been worked out in advance, so you’ll just be in and out . . . .”
You didn’t refuse a thing like that. You refuse Mr. Quong and he picks up the phone the minute you leave the office. Two blocks later something inconvenient happens.
A small-town cop, so there wouldn’t be the heat you’d get if you dumped one of New York’s Finest. Just push the button and leave. Nobody would care.
“You do this right and I’ll remember it,” Mr. Quong had said. “I been watching you. I can use somebody with guts and a few brains. And my friend’s friend will have a little something for you when it’s over.
“And get rid of that Korean bitch, or you’ll end up behind the counter in a produce store. Find yourself a nice hometown girl to stick your dick in.”
So Connie was yesterday’s menu. He wouldn’t even say goodbye—he wouldn’t have to. Like the man said, he was looking to move up in the world.
But to do that he had to pull the plug on Wild Bill, the Law North of the Parkway.
Someone had done their homework. The marshal lived just south of town, and if you walked a hundred yards or so up a dirt road just past the second stop sign on Tunbridge Lane you had an unobstructed view of the back of his garage. Take a car, they had told him. If you park it just twenty feet back into the piney woods no one will spot it, and this is a town where people are suspicious of a man on foot.
Tuesday was Cheffin’s poker night, so he always came home for dinner. All you had to do was wait.
The road apparently saw some use as a lovers’ lane because there were a couple of used condoms lying around under the bushes. This spoke well of its privacy and Freddie planned to be long gone before it was dark enough for the teenagers to go into heat. He took a blue British Airways flight bag from the trunk of his car and set out back through the trees.
The garage was just as it had been described to him, a wooden shed at the back of the property. It had a set of double doors that looked like they had been left open for decades, and there were no windows. It was going to be almost too easy.
He was waiting at the back when he heard the marshal’s car on the gravel driveway. He unzipped the flight bag and took out a .22 automatic fitted with a silencer. For close work a .22 was best and there were nine hollow-point bullets in the magazine. The pistol was guaranteed cold and untraceable.
Freddie edged nervously up the side of the garage. The car was in the garage now. He was nearly up to the entrance when he heard the motor cut off.
Then the car door opened. There were the sounds of someone clambering out, apparently with some difficulty, and then the car door slammed shut again. This was it.
Freddie stepped around to the garage entrance. He held the pistol in both hands. It was dark in there, but he could make out the outline of Cheffins’ tan shirt.
“Who the fuck are you?” the marshal asked. His answer was four bullets in the chest. The distance was no more than fifteen feet, and each time the pistol went off with no more noise than the pop of a bubblegum balloon.
But he was tough. He just stood there, big dark stains on his shirt front, looking surprised. So Freddie shot him once more in the throat, and then he went down.
Freddie snicked on the garage light. He was shaking all over. Very cautiously, he walked up on Cheffins and was a little surprised to discover the guy was still alive—not by much, but alive. Freddie pressed the muzzle of his pistol against Cheffins’ head and pulled the trigger one last time. That settled that.
There was an oil rag on a little counter along the wall. Freddie picked it up and used it to wipe off the pistol, which he then dropped beside the body. Best to leave it behind rather than take the risk of being caught with it. Then he turned off the garage light and stepped outside. Standing in the doorway, he could just make out the soles of the marshal’s shoes. It was six o’clock and the light was failing. No one was going to find anything before tomorrow morning.
Freddie walked back through the woods, forcing himself not to hurry. So far he had done everything right. He hadn’t made a move than wasn’t according to plan. All he had to do now was avoid getting picked up, and the best way to do that was to act natural and not lose his cool.
The walk did him good. By the time he got back to his car he had gotten over the jitters and was perfectly calm again.
The car was one he had rented with a stolen credit card. He dropped it off in Stamford and walked to the bus station. By eleven o’clock he was back in New York.
Now all he had to do was get paid.
His instructions were clear. He was to phone Mr. Quong’s office with the message “birds fly south,” simply to confirm that the job was done. Then he was to get back on a bus and go to Atlantic City, to the Oasis Hotel, where a reservation in the name of “Mr. Chan” would be waiting for him. The hotel was owned by associates of Mr. Quong, so he would be perfectly safe there. He was to wait in his room, seeing no one except the room service waiters, until Cheffins’ death was confirmed in the newspapers. Then someone would contact him. He would get money and an airline ticket. It was thought best that he stayed out of the country for four or five months, so he figured that the money would have to be a comfortable chunk.
The only thing that bothered Freddie was the question he was probably never going to get answered: what made a small-town cop worth all this trouble? You could get a street hustler or a pimp done for five hundred, and the going rate on serious homicides was only four or five thousand. Cops were a little more because you had to bring in outside talent and that meant brokers’ fees, but still it wasn’t a fortune. Even a good hitter had to do eight or ten jobs a year just to earn a decent living.
But this thing with Cheffins was being treated like a real celebrity whack—four or five months was a long time to spend lying in a deck chair on somebody’s else’s tab. It didn’t make a lot of sense.
But Freddie was prepared to collect his money and keep his questions to himself. It was a good deal and he wasn’t going to argue with it.
The hotel lobby looked very nice, the one time he passed through it, and his room even had a bar. That was about all he got to see of Atlantic City. One time he tried to go down to the casino, but he didn’t even make it to the elevator. Some huge guinea in a blue suit appears out of nowhere, takes him by the arm and says, “Everything you need is in your
room, Mr. Chan. If you’re hungry we’ll send you up a cheeseburger.”
So Freddie waited, for three days. He watched the dirty movies on the Pay-Per-View. He made a pass at the Puerto Rican girl who did up his room. He made a serious dent on the bar stock. He waited.
On the third night he was awakened at three in the morning by the phone ringing.
“Take a walk, Mr. Chan. Leave the hotel through the kitchen exit. A car will be waiting for you.”
The car was there, a dark Chevy. The door on the front passenger side opened and Freddie got in. There was the driver and two men on the back seat.
“You did very well,” the driver told him. “I like a man who can follow instructions.”
Then he handed Freddie a plane ticket in a TWA folder and a wad of bills held together with a rubber band.
Freddie took them both and immediately began counting the money, which was probably the idea. At first he hardly seemed to notice when the man seated immediately behind him leaned forward and screwed an ice pick into the base of his skull.
. . . . .
All the time Sal was probing his brains, the Chink’s legs jerked around a lot and his eyes rolled in their sockets. But a living man doesn’t move like that. That was just his muscles twitching as they got the message: it’s all over, Freddie Ju is no longer with us. Frank was pretty sure he never even had time to figure out he was being murdered. After all, it only took about ten seconds.
When he was absolutely satisfied the guy was dead, Sal yanked his ice pick out of Freddie’s neck and covered his head with a plastic bag. It was an unnecessary precaution because there was hardly a drop of blood.
“You want him in the trunk, Mr. Rizza?”
Frank reached across and took back his money. Then he put the plane ticket into the late Freddie Ju’s inside coat pocket—let the cops waste their time wondering what business this punk had in Dallas.
Angel Page 21