Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  It was so easy. He was so busy enjoying himself that he didn’t even see the knife until the blade was at his throat. And then it was too late. By the time he began to pull away she had already cut through the artery. He tried to say something, but the first word died in a wheezy gasp as his windpipe was severed. Angel’s hands were becoming slippery with blood as she struggled to hold him down. He was strong for such a little man and broke free, but only to stumble and go down on his hands and knees, the blood now pumping rhymically from his neck, spattering the bedroom carpet. Then, almost at once, he simply collapsed and rolled over onto his right side. Angel had the impression that he was looking at her face when the light went out in his eyes. He had taken only a few seconds to die.

  . . . . .

  The ring in the stone wall was about four feet off the floor, which was an awkward height if you happened to be handcuffed to it. The smaller man, whose name seemed to be Ralph, had offered Lisa a chair, but if she was going to die she wanted to see it coming and the alternative to facing the wall would have been to sit with her arms folded back over her shoulders so that her elbows pointed almost straight up. On the whole she preferred to stand, thank you very much.

  Once she was safely fettered, Rizza’s two thugs seemed to forget she was even there—perhaps they regarded her as already dead.

  “Jesus, did you see the tits on that broad?” the fat man said as he sat down at one end of a white sofa and lit a cigarette. He was not five feet away from Lisa, but he never even glanced at her. That was fine. She figured it was probably safer to be ignored.

  “No, and neither did you.”

  “Maybe, but she wasn’t leaving much to the imagination. What a piece of work. I think she’s wasted on Frank.”

  “Show her your leg iron and you could be next.”

  They both laughed at this, so apparently it was an established joke between them.

  “Maybe I should tell his wife,” the fat one said, and they laughed again.

  A few minutes later they could hear water running upstairs.

  “Well, that was quick.” Ralph looked at his watch, as if he had been timing them. “I guess Frank doesn’t go in for a lot of foreplay.”

  “No, listen,” the fat one said, pointing at the ceiling. “It’s the shower. She’s washing his back for him.”

  They both listened, in perfect silence. After a while the sound of the water ceased.

  “Now they’ll get busy.”

  “Don’t get excited, Two-Gun.”

  “Excited, hell . . . I just wish I was up there instead of Frank.”

  So they were both surprised when they saw Angel coming down the staircase. First they saw her legs, with the green silk trailing slightly behind, then the rest of her. She hadn’t troubled to tie the belt of the kimono.

  “Holy shit . . .”

  The fat man began to push himself up out of his seat, apparently out of respect for the sight of her naked body, but he had hardly made it to a crouch when the room seemed to explode.

  Except that it was only the fat man’s head. The back part of his skull came off in what seemed like one big piece, filling the air with a pink haze. The second shot must have caught him in the chest, because he pitched forward as if he had had the wind knocked out of him.

  Ralph never got out of his chair. He was still struggling to free the gun from his shoulder holster when the third shot tore his neck open.

  Lisa hadn’t been aware she was screaming until the sound of gunfire died away and she could hear herself. She stopped at once. She stood staring in mute horror as Angel walked over to where Ralph was still half sitting half lying in the chair, calmly put the muzzle of her enormous revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger. His face just blew apart, leaving nothing but a bloody crater, and the force of the blast made him collapse to the floor.

  Without any show of hurry, Angel knelt down and reached inside the Ralph’s coat, pulling out a flat automatic pistol which she then threw to the other side of the room. The fat man was harder to manage, but at last she found a gun in his belt and it joined the other. Only then, when she had satisfied herself about the two dead hoodlums, did she seem to remember Lisa. She looked at her for a moment and then smiled.

  “It’s a mess, isn’t it” she said. “My cleaning woman will probably quit after this.”

  The room smelled of gunpowder and blood, and Lisa’s ears were still ringing from the concussion of the explosions.

  “What about Rizza?” she asked.

  Angel smiled again, a smile at once beautiful and frightening. “Frank is taking a nap. He won’t be coming down.”

  Then she pulled the front of her kimono back together and tied the belt, since apparently the distraction had served its purpose. She sat down at the other end of the sofa, her foot almost touching the fat man’s shattered head.

  “Now that we’re alone we can talk.” She dropped her revolver on the coffee table the way another woman might have put down her handbag. “Tell me about Jim.”

  36

  Warren Pratt was hungry when he landed in San Francisco. He couldn’t touch solid food on planes, not even the peanuts that came with his obligatory double vodka, and the half-hour layover in St. Louis had been consumed by the jog trot from one end of the terminal to the other in order to squeak aboard his connecting flight.

  Kinkaid was sympathetic, but only to the point of buying him a hotdog to eat while they walked back to the parking lot.

  “I’ll make it up to you at dinner,” he said. “I want to get back.”

  “You worried about your girlfriend? I don’t blame you. So why didn’t you bring her with you?”

  “I figure she’s safer at the hotel than she is with me. It’s been an eventful morning.”

  Then he told Pratt everything that had happened.

  “And she’s sure it was Angel?”

  “She’s sure.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s right.”

  Kinkaid didn’t answer, which meant that he believed that Angel Wyman had been pawing through his shaving bag, which meant that she probably had.

  “What about this gangster? Can you make good on your deal?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then I’ll send a nice wreath to your funeral. Guys like that generally don’t much care for being screwed over, you know. They don’t feel it’s good for their standing in the community.”

  Kinkaid stood beside the door of his rented car, fumbling with the key. He had a psychotic ex-sweetheart on his ass, and now some local capo who was trying to keep off Death Row. He probably didn’t need reminding that things didn’t look too good.

  “You can have him put away any time you like,” Pratt said gently. “Don’t worry about him. His little escapade with you this morning amounts to kidnapping with bodily harm, which is a capital offense in this state.”

  “I can’t do that, Warren.” Kinkaid glanced at him over the roof of the car and then smiled the way he always did when he seemed to have reached the end of his tether. “I need him—he can lead me to Angel. And if I touch him she’ll go to ground. She’ll just fade away. I can’t kid myself that I’m not on her list, and I can’t live the rest of my life waiting for her to turn up again.”

  By then he had the door open, and for a while he could retreat into the details of getting the car started and out of its parking space. He didn’t speak again until they had turned onto the freeway.

  “How are we with the FBI?”

  “I phoned them after I talked to you,” Pratt answered, who was carefully reading the billboards as they drove north. “They’re looking for a judge to sign an arrest warrant for interstate flight, and as soon as they find one it’ll be faxed to every Bureau office in the country.”

  “Did you tell them what I told you?”

  “Yes. The San Francisco office is primed. Just don’t be under any illusions that they’re going to kill themselves looking to find her, though. They’ll wait until we’ve found her and then
they’ll make the collar. As far as I’m concerned, they’re welcome to it.”

  Kinkaid glanced at him inquisitively and then, perhaps a bit ostentatiously, returned to his driving.

  “The Bureau has something called the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes,” Pratt explained, in the tone of a man conveying unwelcome news. “And their guru on serial killers put together a crash profile of our Angel. The verdict is there’s no way she’ll let herself be taken alive. If she goes down she’ll stage it as Gotterdämmerung. Best not to be part of the supporting cast.”

  . . . . .

  When they got to the hotel, Pratt collected his room key while Kinkaid inquired if his room had been switched yet. The answer was no, not yet. He tried to call his lady friend on the house phone, but there was no answer.

  “Mrs. Kinkaid went out a little more than an hour ago,” the desk clerk told him.

  “Then there isn’t much point in going up,” Kinkaid said, with an indifference that was just a little too studied.

  “Relax, Jim. It’s Sunday afternoon. She probably decided on a little therapeutic shopping.”

  “I promised you lunch, didn’t I.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  He left a message that, if “Mrs. Kinkaid” came back, or if there were any calls, he could be found in the Redwood Room. Then they left Pratt’s suitcase in the bellman’s closet.

  The Redwood Room had something of the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club. The decoration was spare and the white tablecloths immense. Their waiter seemed to resent the intrusion, which at that hour was not unreasonable.

  “I can recommend the fish,” Kinkaid said, once they had been seated and offered something to drink. “Try the abalone.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s like a huge barnacle. The foot is considered a local delicacy.”

  “I’ll pass, thanks. Besides, you’re always recommending the fish.”

  It had been intended as the lightest banter, but Pratt could have saved himself the trouble. No one was listening. From one second to the next, Kinkaid had simply switched off.

  “I wonder if you’d excuse me for a moment,” he said, checking his watch for the third or fourth time since they had sat down. “I’ll just go up to the room and see if she left a message.”

  When he was alone, Pratt took the liberty of being amused by the romantic nature that apparently boiled within his well-bred client. He booked his honey into hotels as “Mrs. Kinkaid” and got the fidgets if she took herself off for a couple of hours. Ah, love.

  Pratt was not romantic. He had been divorced for twelve years and his teenage daughters were in Cleveland, being raised by someone else. But he wished Kinkaid all the luck there was, figuring that after Angel Wyman he probably deserved it.

  What the hell, maybe he would try the abalone after all.

  “There’s nothing,” Kinkaid said, easing back into his chair as if afraid someone might catch him at it. “After this morning, I don’t like it.”

  “Maybe she didn’t fancy sitting alone in a hotel room. She’s probably safer out in public anyway.”

  “If she had intended to be gone for any length of time she would have left me a note. I think she went out assuming that she’d be back before we returned.”

  Pratt examined the cover of his menu with poignant regret, because he realized that lunch was a lost cause.

  “Maybe we’d better go up and have a look together,” he said.

  . . . . .

  In his professional life Pratt had become a connoisseur of hotel rooms, and his general rule of thumb was that you get what you pay for—the higher the per diem the better the forensic yield. He hated a call to some downtown flophouse where the carpet was a worn, dirty fuzz and the corpse was face down on a bedsheet that looked as if it hadn’t been changed since the Truman administration. He always maintained in such circumstances that, unless his perpetrator was a complete idiot and had left his prints on a half-empty water glass in the bathroom, the only useful evidence he was likely to find might be some blood and tissue samples recovered from underneath the victim’s fingernails. A cheap hotel room was as anonymous as a bus terminal and a good deal more private. Unfortunately, homicide being a great respecter of class barriers, the vast majority of murders took place in precisely such places.

  This room, on the other hand, would have made an ideal crime scene. The maid service was obviously excellent, which meant that a lot of the irrelevant hair and fiber traces from previous occupants had already been vacuumed away, and all those polished surfaces, the marble tabletops and the ornamental brass of the chairs, had the potential for giving up some really clear and useful fingerprints. It was almost a pity there was no dead body.

  Doubtless Kinkaid didn’t see it that way. He stood in the center of the room, his hands clasped behind his back, looking almost as helpless as perehaps he felt.

  “When you came back this morning and found out you’d had a visitor, did you straighten things up?”

  “I didn’t, but it appears that Lisa did,” he answered, glancing around as if a little astonished to find himself in such a place. “It’s natural . . .”

  Natural yes, but unfortunate. Pratt would have liked to see the room right after Angel tossed it, if only to know what she was interested in finding out.

  Nevertheless, he went through the drill. The bed was still unmade, which meant that the housekeeper hadn’t gotten this far in her rounds yet—a small but significant plus. He checked the wastepaper baskets and found nothing except a toothpaste carton and a laddered stocking. He ran the side of a pencil lead over the message pad next to the telephone and came up with nothing.

  In the bathroom he did find a half-ounce spray bottle of perfume, the kind women usually carried in their handbags, left on the sink. It had been there long enough that he knew the fragrance without having to check the label. Sandalwood.

  “I assume this is Lisa’s.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we can forget about my shopping theory. No woman is in such a hurry to look at dresses that she leaves her perfume behind.”

  The suitcases were on their racks.

  “Are they locked?”

  “Yes, I think so. Most of my things are in the dresser, so I haven’t checked in some time.”

  Kinkaid took out his keycase and then was surprised to discover that the latches on his brown Samsonite popped open at a touch. Inside was one of Lisa’s nighties, a black see-through babydoll that had probably looked very sexy before someone spoiled the effect by tearing the front open from neckline to hem.

  Pratt took it out of his hand and only had to glance at the tear to see what had happened.

  “She just took it in both hands and ripped it apart,” he said. “She found out you’ve got yourself another playmate and she’s letting you know she isn’t happy about it.”

  At that precise moment the phone rang.

  37

  Girl talk. Comparing notes, a few shared confidences—that sort of thing. Except for the handcuffs and one or two other details, it might have been a high-school slumber party.

  Angel seemed to regard the two dead bodies soundlessly bleeding into her living room carpet like old stains on the furniture. They no longer even annoyed her. She had stopping noticing them. They weren’t interesting. She wanted to hear about Jim. More than that, she wanted to tell Lisa about Jim.

  “I don’t think he’d ever been with a woman when I knew him,” she said. “I was a little forward. I think I frightened him.”

  “He’s not the only one.”

  Lisa was having a tough time. Tears of the purest terror were coursing down her face, and her knees kept threatening to fold under her. She had to hang on to the ring in the wall to keep from falling down. And on top of everything else she felt an almost overwhelming desire to pee.

  If she even heard, Angel gave no sign of it. She had her legs drawn up under her on the sofa, exactly where the fat thug had been sitting
not ten minutes before. She could have used his corpse for a footrest.

  “Is he still shy? Or has he gotten over that?”

  When there was no answer her brilliant blue eyes began to darken, creating the impression that her surface calm was just that, and at any second a terrible rage might break through it.

  Keep her talking, Lisa thought to herself. She was on the edge of panic, but her mind was clear enough to perceive that that rage could end everything before the next breath.

  She was insane. This woman was out of her fucking mind. And the fact that she was so flawlessly beautiful only made her all the more terrifying.

  Keep her talking. Or she may just decide to kill you right here and now.

  “He’s shy.” The words were dry in Lisa’s mouth, so that she almost had to spit them out. “He just needs . . .”

  Needs what? What in God’s name was she talking about? She couldn’t remember . . . .

  But it didn’t make any difference, because Angel had picked up the thread and was busy weaving it into some fantasy of her own.

  “Some encouragement.”

  She seemed wholly satisfied with her own answer. She knew just exactly what Jim needed. She knew what everybody needed. And deserved. You could see it in her face.

  “He could be anything,” she went on, as if drifting into some sort of trance. “He has the brains. He just needs someone to give him confidence in himself. With the Wyman family backing he could be governor one of these days. Or senator. Anything. His father shouldn’t have interfered.”

  “Did he interfere?”

  Keep her talking. It was a strategy to stay alive. And to fight the fear. Do something. Make her think you’ve taken her side. And yet mixed with the fear and the longing for life was a strange kind of curiosity. Jim had never talked very much about his father.

  So the question was not entirely innocent.

  Angel glanced up at her face, fixing her with the intensity of that glance. And in that instant Lisa was granted an inkling of the power this woman must have over men—perhaps only another woman would see that there was something not quite human in the expression of those brilliant blue eyes.