Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  “But he could turn on you. I used to think Kendry was the worst bad-ass I’d ever met or heard of. That was before I read that file on Kitten.”

  “I’ll still put my money on Veil in any mano a mano fight. In any case, why worry about it? Veil has to know this guy’s on his case, so I don’t even feel the need to try and warn him. All you and I have to do is stay alive and on the move.”

  “Oh, really? Is that all we have to do? I’m thinking maybe it’s time you resigned your commission and left it to the cops and the F.B.I. We’ll put you in protective custody, keep you on ice until this thing is resolved one way or another.”

  “No,” I said simply. “I don’t believe anybody can protect me against Kitten if he wants to get at me, and you’re the only cop I trust at the moment. Besides, it’s you Henry Kitten will kill if I don’t keep going. He was very clear on that point, and I don’t think for a moment that he was bluffing. Besides, I have no intention of crawling into a hole. I still have a client, remember?” I gestured toward the door. “Let’s split.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The only place left to go; the last bread crumb. Colletville.”

  Garth nodded, put on his coat, and followed me out the door.

  13.

  We stopped by Garth’s apartment to pack overnight bags, picked up the three New York Times we wanted from a pile in the basement, then took off. It was a drizzling winter dusk, and I read by the faint illumination of the car’s dome light while Garth plowed through rush hour traffic and watched in the rearview mirror for anyone who might be trying to follow us. I started with the newspaper dated the day after Veil disappeared, since it would be the one to carry a report of anything significant that had happened on the day in question.

  I had anticipated hours of reading, analysis, discussion with Garth, and lots of guesswork, but we had barely made it across town to the West Side Highway before I had the sinking feeling that I knew exactly who wanted Veil dead. I felt I knew, and wished I didn’t, the identity of the man who had ordered up my torture and death, and who was, to date, responsible for the deaths of a dozen people.

  Since there was no way I wanted this man, with all the power he represented, for an enemy, I decided to keep looking for a candidate who would present far fewer complications. It was no use. No matter what I read, I kept coming back to the same name, the same set of articles. By the time we crossed the George Washington Bridge, there was no longer any doubt in my mind about the identity of the killer we were hunting.

  “Shit,” I said with a sigh, dropping the papers on the floor and slumping in the seat.

  “What’s the matter? You getting eyestrain?”

  “I’ve got heartstrain. I know who our psychopathic killer is.”

  Garth glanced sideways at me, and even in the dim light I could tell by the expression on his face that he wasn’t quite sure whether or not I was joking. “Come on, Mongo; you’ve only had your nose in those papers for less than an hour, and most of the time you’ve been skimming.”

  “I really only had to read one piece, and the follow-up article inside. It leaps right out at you.”

  “So? Don’t keep me in suspense. What did you find out?”

  “Garth, what happened on the day Veil disappeared?”

  “Lots of things happened,” Garth snapped impatiently. He didn’t like traffic, and he didn’t like to play guessing games; still, I felt I had to come at him from an angle in order to make him feel the same measure of shock I had felt when I’d realized the truth. “Why don’t you just get to the point?”

  “The president came to town.”

  Garth laughed harshly. “Kevin Shannon didn’t do it, Mongo. His wife would never give him permission to do such nasty things; it’s bad politics. Trust me on this one; Shannon’s not our man.”

  “But one of Shannon’s key people is.”

  “Who?”

  “Orville Madison.”

  “Who the hell is Orville Madison?”

  I looked quickly at Garth, saw that he was serious. It made me very uneasy. “Did you hear what I said? It’s Orville Madison.”

  “I heard what you said. You tell me this Orville Madison may be the man behind all this; now tell me who Orville Madison is.”

  “You get the paper every day, Garth. How the hell can you not know who Orville Madison is?”

  “I read the sports, metropolitan, and sometimes the entertainment sections, brother,” Garth said evenly. “I don’t listen to newscasts, and I haven’t followed national or international news since Valhalla. I know the name of the president and the mayor of New York; on a good day, I may even remember the name of the governor. It’s enough. Since we’re all doomed anyway, I don’t give a damn what the stupid politicians and generals are up to. In the end, it won’t make any difference. I thought you felt the same way.”

  At one time I had. The words spoken by a madman, and the things he had shown us, had left wounds that would never fully heal. However, time and work had wrought a good deal of healing in me, and I had once again begun to take an interest in things and events around me. Not so, I now realized, with my brother. Garth remained trapped as deeply as ever in the depths of depression and despair.

  I wondered if it was killing him.

  “Orville Madison is Shannon’s nominee for secretary of state,” I said quietly, suddenly filled with a great sadness.

  “So?” Garth’s voice was a kind of shrug. “What does the Times have to say about Madison that makes you think he’s the guy we’re looking for?”

  “It doesn’t call him a psychopathic killer, if that’s what you mean,” I replied, countering with a little sarcasm of my own. “But what’s there pretty well matches the profile we already have of the man.”

  “A speculative profile.”

  “Veil was shot at and disappeared on the eve of the president’s announcement of his appointments to the cabinet; Shannon’s penchant for secrecy is legendary, and so the public had no inkling of who those men and women were going to be until Shannon made the announcement. It wasn’t until the next day that the names and biographical profiles of those people appeared in the papers. It was the next day’s Times that Po was reading almost two weeks later when he was killed, which has to mean that he was most concerned about what he found in it.”

  “You don’t know which of three papers he was reading, and you don’t know if he was reading about the presidential appointments.”

  “It’s easy enough to check the date; all you have to do is call the Albany cops when we stop. They should give you that information. You’ll see I’m right.”

  “You still haven’t told me what makes you so suspicious of Madison.”

  “For openers, he’s currently Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and will remain so until he’s confirmed.”

  There was a long silence. Finally, Garth said: “Go ahead.”

  “Being Director of the C.I.A. isn’t a big deal in itself. The position can be, and usually is, a political appointment made for lots of different reasons, including political payoffs, and the man who gets it usually has a public record a mile long. That’s not the case with Madison. He came up through the ranks, and it was a shadowy journey to say the least. He was appointed to the top post two and a half years ago, but before that he was Director of Operations in charge of all the heavy, sneaky stuff the C.I.A. does. You don’t even get a published photo of the Director of Operations, much less a public record, and you usually find out damn little about the man even after he leaves the post—which you usually don’t find out about.”

  “There has to be information about him available now.”

  “Oh, sure. The Times bio is filled with all sorts of personal information—but nothing about his record when he was running Operations. That’s all classified. He’s fifty-eight years old, and he’s been with the C.I.A. one hell of a long time. We can’t even know how much of the personal stuff is made up. He’s a Goddamn pig in a poke.”

/>   Garth thought about it. “To the public, yes, but certainly not to Kevin Shannon—and not to the House and Senate members who know him and must have worked with him. Christ, after all the embarrassments caused by cabinet members over the past fifteen years, you have to assume that Shannon and his other people have vetted all those nominees—especially this Orville Madison—more thoroughly than any nominees in history. Nobody’s ever accused Shannon of being a dummy. Hell, you even like him. Finally, don’t forget that all of the nominees will be grilled at the confirmation hearings by senators who’ve gotten very picky about whom they consent to put into those kinds of positions of power. It won’t fly, Mongo. Shannon’s not about to nominate some crazy who could sink his administration before it even sets sail.”

  “Not if he knew Madison was crazy. In fact, that may be precisely what’s going on here, the key to it all. Sure, Madison’s been vetted—but let’s assume the investigators missed something, and it’s a biggie, something very dark and nasty that’s been buried for a long time and which would prevent Madison from being confirmed if people found out about it. Madison knew that once his nomination was made public, there were certain people—Veil Kendry, for one—who could hurt him badly if they ever started talking about what they knew, and they were believed—his link with Po, for example. God knows why Shannon wants a former C.I.A. Operations man for a sensitive, up-front post like secretary of state, but he obviously does. And Madison wants the post. Now, once Madison becomes a public figure he knows he’s going to be vulnerable to disclosures to the press, or at the confirmation hearings, and so he decides to launch a preemptive strike against the man he fears most—Veil Kendry.”

  “If Madison were so afraid of these past associations coming to light, why would he wait two weeks to kill Po?”

  “He wasn’t concerned about Po saying anything to the press, because Po had enough problems of his own and certainly wouldn’t make a very creditable accuser. Po became a danger to Madison only when we discovered a link between Po and Veil Kendry. Madison was worried about what Po might say to us. That’s how that tune goes. It has to be Orville Madison, Garth.”

  Garth began drumming his fingers nervously on the steering wheel. “Keep looking, Mongo,” he said after a long silence. “Nobody ever said you didn’t have a silver tongue, and you make a pretty good hypothetical case for our man being this Madison joker. But it’s still all speculation, without a single shred of proof; no matter what you say, I find it damn unlikely that the kind of cold-blooded maniac we’re looking for could get through the kind of screening process any cabinet nominee goes through. There must be something else in one of those newspapers.”

  “Damn it, Garth, there isn’t. This is it.”

  “Keep looking, anyway.”

  We stayed overnight at a motel just off the Kingston exit of the New York State Thruway, thirty miles from Colletville, to the west. Garth called the Albany police, identified himself as a New York cop, and asked for the date of the newspaper Po had been reading in his study the night he’d been killed.

  I was right.

  We checked out at dawn in order to get to Colletville early. We ate breakfast at a diner in Veil’s hometown, then drove directly to the high school. Given more time and less pressure, we probably could have been a bit more subtle in our approach. Not being blessed with these things, we simply marched into the high school office and introduced ourselves to a secretary. Garth showed his shield and asked if it would be possible for us to see the principal for a few minutes. It was. We were ushered into a nicely appointed office highlighted by a rust-colored rug and a collection of hunting trophies in a display case next to a window looking out over the surrounding Catskills, their forests covered now with early morning mist.

  The principal, Matthew Holmes, was a boyish-looking man in his early thirties. Garth introduced me not only as his brother, but as a criminologist working on the matter in question as a paid consultant. The preliminaries over, I sat in a chair to one side of the office, letting Garth, with his police credentials, take the point.

  “Lieutenant,” the young principal said, “how can I help you?”

  “First, we appreciate your agreeing to see us on such short notice,” Garth replied.

  “I take it this is a police matter?”

  “Yes, it is, but I have to tell you that I have no official capacity in this county. I can only ask you to give me certain information, some of which may be confidential, as a courtesy. We’re searching for a material witness to the crimes of arson and multiple murder. Other murders may be committed if we don’t act quickly, which is why we really don’t feel we can afford the time to go through the process of getting a court order to see certain school records.”

  “I see,” Holmes said tightly. Suddenly the man seemed decidedly uncomfortable as he toyed with a heavy glass paperweight and stared out the window at the mountains. “Why don’t you tell me what it is you want to know?”

  “We have reason to believe that the crimes that have been committed are closely connected to a man by the name of Veil Kendry. Kendry—”

  “Who?” the principal asked as he turned quickly and looked at Garth. He had stopped playing with the paperweight, and his discomfort appeared to have gone as quickly as it had come.

  “Veil Kendry,” Garth repeated slowly. “Do you know of him?”

  “Somehow, the name seems familiar …” Holmes thought about it, finally shook his head. He looked immensely relieved. “No, sir, I can’t say that I do.”

  The mercurial changes in Matthew Holmes’s manner made me wonder who had come to mind when Garth had mentioned arson and murder. I wanted to ask, thought it better not to. Colletville, I was sure, had its own problems, and anything that didn’t concern Veil Kendry was irrelevant to our needs.

  “According to our information,” Garth said, “Kendry went to school here. Your central district office confirmed that. He would have graduated—if he graduated—in nineteen-sixty-three or four. I’d like to look at his school records, if I may.”

  “Why, Lieutenant?”

  “We’re looking very hard for Mr. Kendry, not only because he’s a material witness, but because he could be in considerable danger. It’s a long shot, but those records just could reveal the name of a relative or friend we could contact who might know where he is. Actually, there could be other information in there that could be helpful, but I won’t know until I look.”

  There was a prolonged silence, during which I had the distinct impression that Holmes was thinking about more than Garth’s rather straightforward request. “I don’t see why not,” he said at last. “Obviously, we’re a very small district, and if this Veil Kendry did go here, his records could still be kept at this school building. Just a moment, please.”

  Holmes pressed a button on his intercom, instructed his secretary to search for any records on Veil Kendry, using the approximate dates Garth had given him. He also asked her to bring us coffee.

  We sat for the next fifteen minutes sipping coffee and chatting. Holmes, a graduate of a good school, had accepted the post in Colletville because it had afforded him the opportunity of having his own school at a relatively young age. Now, he told us, he was interested in a “change of pace,” and had applied for a principal’s post in the South Bronx. He wanted to know all we could tell him about New York City, and we assured him that being the principal of a school in the South Bronx would be a change of pace indeed.

  Finally Holmes’s secretary, a cheerful, gray-haired woman in her fifties, came back into the office. She handed a faded, yellow file to the principal, smiled at us, then turned and left.

  “I don’t know what’s in here,” Holmes said to Garth. “Because of the legal implications, I think it might be more correct if I didn’t allow you to actually read the file. I’ll look at it now, and I’m sure I’ll be able to answer any questions you might have.”

  “That will be fine,” Garth said. “We’re most interested in the name of a relative�
�or anyone at all—he might have stayed in contact with over the years, or even visited periodically.”

  Holmes nodded, opened the file folder, and began to scan the contents of the first page. I watched his eyes move back and forth across the page, saw him frown slightly. “There’s an address here, but I know the people living there now, and their name isn’t Kendry.”

  “No. The Kendrys moved away some time ago. I checked that.”

  “According to this record, he didn’t even live with his parents during his high school years. There’s another name listed here … an aunt by the name of Madeline Jamison. However, the houses in that block were torn down a couple of years ago. That’s who he lived with while he went to high school, but that house isn’t there anymore.”

  “May I use your phone book?” I asked, rising from my chair.

  Holmes took a thin directory out of his top drawer, handed it to me. There weren’t any Jamisons listed. I looked at Garth, shook my head, sat back down in my chair.

  “It seems he only lived with his aunt off and on. Twice he was … oh, my.” Holmes abruptly looked away from the file, once again appeared uncomfortable.

  “Mr. Holmes?” Garth prodded gently. “What about the times when he wasn’t living with his aunt? Did he go back to live with his parents, or did he live somewhere else?”

  “Lieutenant,” Holmes said tersely, “I’m afraid I never realized the extremely sensitive nature of some of the material in Mr. Kendry’s file. The law says that it must be kept confidential, and I totally agree. I may have made a mistake in agreeing to share this. Frankly, I don’t see how the information could help you find this man, and we could all be in legal difficulty if I share it with you. I think it will be in everyone’s interests if you go ahead and obtain that court order you mentioned.”

  Garth bowed his head, sighed heavily, then leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees. “Mr. Holmes,” he said softly, “two nights ago three young people just past high school age were murdered in Seattle, along with their parents and grandmother. They were all blown to pieces.”