The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  The dean in this case was also a former chairman of the English department, an intimidating gentleman with spectacular gray eyebrows and an almost mandarin sense of his own personal significance. He drove a Mercedes, as befitted his position in the world, and had served his country faithfully and well during the Korean conflict as a member of the Military Police, making something of a specialty out of harassing enlisted homosexuals.

  His office was on the highest floor of the Humanities Building, so Guinness took the elevator up and stepped into the dean’s waiting room, which, like his office, was paneled in wood. His secretary picked up her telephone and whispered something into the mouthpiece, and within five seconds the dean stepped out smiling, his right hand extended in greeting. Guinness took the offered hand only to have the other clapped on his shoulder as he was propelled into the inner office.

  “Sit down, Dr. Guinness,” the dean said, sliding into his own chair. “Please let me express my own very sincere personal condolences on the tragic death of your wife.”

  Guinness muttered something that sounded like “thank you” and made a vague depreciatory gesture with his left hand, and for a moment there was a tight silence. As if to break it, the dean picked up a long yellow lead pencil that had been lying on some papers and began a nervous, rhythmless tapping of the eraser end against the sheet of glass covering his desk top. It must have made more noise than he had intended, because after only six or seven taps he stopped, stared at the eraser for a second or two, and then gently set the pencil back down. He kept his hand on it for just an instant, as if to make sure that it wouldn’t begin to roll, and then settled back in his chair, letting his finger tips rest against each other and smiling kindly. They always smile at you like that just when they’re getting ready to screw you.

  “I suppose you must be terribly at loose ends,” he said, still smiling and still peering over the tips of his fingers, “and you mustn’t allow yourself to worry about things over here. I’ve always observed that in times of trial a university acts rather like an enormous family; we take care of our own. So please don’t be anxious—your colleagues will be happy to cover for you during this period of personal crisis.”

  Guinness suddenly found himself wondering how his dean had heard about Louise’s death. He hadn’t told anybody—he hadn’t even phoned her father yet. There hadn’t been time.

  It had to have been Creon. Probably that morning sometime. Probably while Guinness had been busy identifying the body.

  What the hell else had the damn man said?

  Probably nothing, at least not right out. A few hints would have been enough—college administrators had very fine antennae when it came to scandal and if there was any chance at all of Guinness taking the fall for his wife’s murder, then he would have to be distanced as much as possible from the sacred centers of academe. After all, it wouldn’t do for the police to walk in and arrest him in the middle of class. Think of the newspapers.

  “An enormous family,” the man had said. What bullshit.

  “It’s all arranged. Jenkins and a few of the junior men will take over your classes until the end of the term. And I’m sure we can find someone if you decide you would rather have the summer off—what with the current Ph.D. market, we have no trouble finding people for short-term work. Even on such brief notice as this.”

  The dean smiled again, as if the thought of all those poor hungry bastards coming out of the graduate schools just made his day.

  So there he was. Ray Guinness, the remittance man of Belmont State’s big happy family. With nothing to do all day except watch his laundry go round.

  Of course that wasn’t all there was to watch. There was, for instance, the guy in the pale green Chevy parked outside.

  Not that Guinness particularly minded being tailed. He had grown accustomed to it over the past several days; keeping track of the hotel detectives and the police legmen had developed into a kind of game. When he had his lunch, there was always another party of one crumbling saltines into his chili just three or four tables away, and if he turned around on a city sidewalk he could count on spotting some dude suddenly twisting aside to look into a shop window or leaning against a building as he read the sports pages. If he took a drive, there was always a dark colored hardtop about half a block behind.

  They were always the same five faces. Like factory hands, they worked in shifts, and Guinness got so he always stopped some place for a cup of coffee when it was time for the Changing of the Guards. They weren’t very good, and he didn’t want to make their lives needlessly difficult.

  Five—probably close to half the manpower Creon had in his whole department. It must have been making one hell of a dent in his budget for the month.

  But this guy wasn’t one of the regulars. For one thing, he didn’t seem to keep a schedule; he didn’t come on at nine in the morning and go off at dinnertime. He had simply appeared the day before yesterday and had been around ever since. He was just there—it was almost as if he wanted to be spotted.

  The regular escort hadn’t become aware of him yet, but then they probably wouldn’t have noticed him if he’d been riding a camel. Somehow it never seemed to occur to police that somebody might be watching right along with them. These guys never even turned their heads.

  But he was there all right. And while he watched Guinness and Guinness watched his laundry, Guinness was trying to make up his mind what to do about him.

  He was not a cop, of that much Guinness was sure. Murder not being a federal offense, Louise’s death was purely a local matter. And there was no good reason why Creon should use two sets of tails. Besides, he didn’t look like a cop.

  And if he wasn’t a cop, it would be worth something to discover his interest in this matter. Whoever he was, he would have to know more than Guinness did about what was going on.

  So we bust him.

  Guinness picked himself up out of the chair from which he had been watching his underwear dry and went over to the change booth. He really didn’t need any change, but the booth was toward the front of the Laundromat and provided a better view of the parking lot.

  He slid a dollar bill across the counter and the attendant, a skinny craggy faced old gal with hair dyed to a violent henna that made her look like nothing so much as Abe Lincoln in drag, took a handful of dimes from the cash register and carefully counted out ten, arranging them in pairs on the counter until they made an orderly little two-by-five rectangle. Just to be on the safe side, she counted the ten dimes over once more before pouring what was left back into the till. Guinness pushed them off into the palm of his right hand, smiled a “thank you,” and turned casually around to face the big picture window that took up most of the Laundromat’s front wall. What the hell, if you’re going to watch someone who’s watching you, there is no point in being cute about it. None of that over the shoulder shit; he’ll spot that faster than anything. But a man who simply looks out of a window, without making an enormous production of it, could just be checking the weather.

  The pale green Chevy was still there.

  Yes, this was a gentleman who deserved a few minutes of our undivided attention, provided he could be gotten off somewhere by himself. It would be necessary to shake the police, but that shouldn’t present too much of a problem. Not for Raymond M. Guinness, social pariah and local master criminal.

  Guinness experienced a decided thrill at the prospect.

  It would be good to be doing something positive, to be on the offensive for once.

  He packed his laundry back into the small blue and white canvas suitcase he had owned since college, and he left. The Laundromat was only about ten blocks from his hotel, so he hadn’t bothered with the car. It being a warm day, he slung his coat over his shoulder and set the suitcase down on the sidewalk in order to roll his shirt sleeves up to the elbows.

  Two blocks down from the Laundromat was El Camino Real, until within living memory the main roadway north and south upon which the suburban towns of th
e San Francisco Peninsula were strung like beads. Now all the really serious traffic was on the Bayshore Freeway, but you still went to the El Camino if you wanted to catch a bus, and Guinness wanted to catch a bus.

  He sat down on a bench on the west side of the highway and checked his watch. It was twelve minutes after one, and at that time of the afternoon the local buses ran only about once every half hour. He couldn’t see his police tail, although it was likely that if he turned his head fast enough he would spot a familiar face. The new man, whoever he was, wasn’t being even that coy—across the street, parked in plain view at the head of the next side road up, was a pale green Chevy.

  The arrogant bastard. The son of a bitch was just begging to be taken down.

  Finally a southbound bus came along—Guinness didn’t really care about the direction; he just happened to be on that side of the highway—and, after fishing around in his coat pocket for five of his recently acquired dimes, he got on and found himself a seat over the left rear wheel. Out of the back window, in the right lane so as to keep track of who got off at each stop, the green Chevy was clearly visible, and, about three quarters of a block further back, there was a very familiar looking dark blue Ford. Guinness sighed and shifted his attention to the Blue Cross ads posted over the side windows. Just once in his life he would have liked to be tailed by a hot-pink Cadillac convertible.

  The bus made its painful way past the Pup ’n Hound diner, past a billboard announcing the current feature playing at the Carlos Theater, past a tiny bookstore with a Tudor bay window that Guinness had always had it in mind to investigate someday, and pulled in at the Redwood City Depot.

  It wasn’t much of a place—just a square building with a ticket booth and a concession stand against one wall and some coin operated lockers against the other, with three long rows of slat benches in the middle. Guinness got off his bus and checked his suitcase full of underwear in one of the lockers. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he bought a hot dog and a small paper cup full of tepid Dr. Pepper at the concession stand and sat down on one of the benches to wait for the next bus going north.

  The hot dog wasn’t bad, but the Dr. Pepper made him faintly ill, and it occurred to him, as it did from time to time these days, that since Louise had died he had begun to live an awfully seedy life. Here it was just a week and he was subsisting almost entirely off of junk food. Louise would never have let him sink to a meal like this one. Hot dogs and Dr. Pepper, indeed.

  Lately, he had taken to having his dinner at the McDonald’s a block away from his hotel. Hell, it was fast and you weren’t likely to pick up a social disease in the men’s room.

  Every night a Big Mac and a large order of French fries, every god damned night.

  Louise had always been very careful about that sort of thing. “Fried foods will kill you,” she used to say. “I don’t intend to have you dropping dead on me so I can spend my middle years back clerking for some damned insurance company.” She made sure he had a lot of chicken and fish, and she kept the starches down. If he felt like he just couldn’t live another minute without a nice big greasy cheeseburger, he had to buy it on the QT and eat it in his office at school.

  Now his weight was up a good six or seven pounds and he went around all the time with an oily feeling on the roof of his mouth. All that garbage and he couldn’t even enjoy it; not like when he could believe he was pulling off the crime of the century and knew Louise would put it right with a dinner of skinless chicken and green salad. Hell, he used to go to the Burger King across the street from the campus and feel like he was walking through the doors of a bordello.

  A northbound local pulled in with an exhausted sigh from the air brakes, and Guinness fed another fifty cents into its coin catcher just as the bus closed its doors and started to pull back out onto the El Camino. With any luck at all, that would give him a tiny head start while Creon’s man tried to pry open his rented locker to find out what exactly Belmont’s Othello could be hiding in a bus station beside nine fresh pairs of his BVDs. It was a temptation no cop in the world would be able to resist, and Guinness hoped this one wouldn’t even try.

  Within two blocks of the terminal he pulled the cord over the window, signaling that he wanted off, and was dropped at the next stop, where he turned off on foot into a side street. After about four blocks, he was satisfied he’d shaken his official escort.

  Not so for Green Car, however. He would be back there somewhere, and anyway we didn’t want to lose him. No, we wanted to take him alive, alive and talkative.

  Of course, there was always the chance that he might not feel chatty just that day. If he was the man who had killed Louise, there was even the chance that he would start shooting or something, although Guinness couldn’t really bring himself to worry too much about that. No, the man who had stabbed Louise and had booby trapped his car was a man with a message. He would want to deliver it before he declared war.

  Still, he would be armed. He would be carrying a gun—they all did. It occurred to Guinness that he was going to have to break down and get one for himself sometime soon. It looked like the nice quiet days were over for a while. Maybe forever.

  The green Chevy was nowhere in sight, but that didn’t mean anything. Its driver would have left it somewhere, there being difficulties involved in tailing anyone on foot from a car.

  After a few more blocks, Guinness caught sight of a familiar face reflected in a shop window. His new escort was across the street, leaning up against a building. Very cool he was, not looking like he was tailing anyone and not looking like he wasn’t. He had “pro” written all over him; and not cop pro, but the only pro that mattered. This guy was in The Life, a ghost. Guinness knew the type.

  He was wearing a dark brown summer sport coat and what looked like khaki trousers and no hat, which was a relief. Hell, nobody wore a hat these days; it only passed for a disguise in police circles.

  Dark hair, perhaps even black, with a little silver at the temples—that might or might not be real—but a youngish face. Not tall and with the build of someone who had wrestled in college. Put his age at around thirty-five.

  In that instant, Guinness saw him reach up with his left hand to pull at where his belt was apparently pinching him in the side. The movement brought his elbow out akimbo, revealing that the armholes of his jacket were unusually loose and deep. Well, that was instructive—he was strapped into a shoulder holster.

  It was nearly three before Guinness found what he had been looking for. A nice old fashioned gas station with a nice old fashioned men’s room, the kind that has a latched window high up on one wall rather than a fan that operates off the light switch. He made sure to approach it from the proper angle, keeping his shadow across the street and where he would be able to see the door but not the window.

  Once inside, Guinness turned over the open trash can into which you were supposed to drop your used paper towels and shinnied out through the window, skinning his rib cage and nearly breaking his neck in the process.

  Jesus, it had been a while since he had had to do anything along those lines.

  Outside, he stayed close to the corner of the building. It was only a matter of time before our friend with the shoulder holster would begin to wonder what the hell was taking so long in the fucking john and come across the street to investigate. When he worked himself up to coming in, he would see the turned over trash can and the open window, making the obvious deduction that he had been spotted and that Guinness had ducked out on him, and then come back out through the bathroom door. As soon as he came back out—BAM! Right over the gourd.

  But with what? Guinness considered for a moment the side of his horny hand—it would hardly have been the first time—but decided against it. He was out of practice, and you don’t try to take on a working agent barehanded when you’re out of practice.

  Ultimately, he settled for removing his left sock, sifting in a couple of handfuls of the heavy gravel that was lying all around the back of the gas stat
ion, and tying it off to make a perfectly serviceable little blackjack. He balanced it in his palm for a moment, estimating its weight and how hard a blow he would have to strike. After all, this yoyo wouldn’t be any use to him dead.

  Finally, he could hear the gravel crunch and then someone trying the bathroom door. It was locked, of course, and a gentleman would simply have walked away, finding somewhere else to take his leak. Not this baby—after a few seconds there were the sounds of a lock being picked and then the door opening.

  Instantly the door closed again. Guinness raised his cosh, there were two quick steps on the gravel, and then they were on each other. There in the alley behind a men’s room, two pros face to face.

  Guinness took advantage of that inevitable instant of surprise and brought his weapon down against the side of the other man’s neck. It was enough to stun him and he pitched around a quarter of a turn, instinctively bracing himself with his hands and forearms against the side of the building. One more blow to the base of the skull and he was out, first sinking to his knees, and then gradually, still pressed protectively against the building, he slumped to the ground.

  Dragging him into the men’s room, Guinness was astonished at his weight, but then an unconscious man always feels like he has been padded out with lead.

  Once inside, a quick frisk was in order. Yes, Virginia, there really was a shoulder holster, and in it a lethal looking 7 mm automatic of Spanish manufacture.

  But the big surprise was in the guy’s wallet, in the form of a small, plastic coated federal identity card in a leather holder. Guinness leaned back against the bathroom door to drink it all in: he had just clobbered a member in good standing of the U.S. Secret Service.

  8

  Ernie Tuttle, for such was his name, emerged from the bathroom of his quarters at the Casa Belmont Motel holding a damp washcloth against the back of his head. He had taken his shirt off and on his right shoulder, just at its insertion into the neck, could be seen a large oblong reddish smear that promised to develop into a dandy bruise.