The Summer Soldier (34 page)

“Cops all over the place. I asked some old
guy who tended the peanut machines what the fuss was, and according
to him they’d found the night man in a shed over by the merry go
round, very dead. A length of electrical extension cord was still
twisted around his neck.

“Anyway, the office had led us to believe
that you were reasonably hinky about clearing this one up, so we
decided to risk it. We found your stiff right where you said he’d
be.

“Whoever iced him was the tidy type: all the
papers were gone from his wallet, no weapons, no personal effects,
even the labels had been torn out of his clothes—your perfect John
Doe, or as perfect as you can make one without cutting off his
hands and pulling the dental work out of his head. There was an
ugly looking bruise on his throat and the cartilage in his windpipe
was all smashed up—enough to kill him, but we don’t think he died
of that. We also found a trace of blood in his right ear;
everything else was consistent with death by smothering. Somebody
doesn’t mess around.

“We wrapped him up in a plastic tarp and put
him in the back of the wagon and got out of there, fast. He’s
stashed now where he’ll keep for the time being. You want an
autopsy?”

“Thanks just the same. Just take his prints
and lose him.”

Jesus. Think of the fun if the cops had found
him first.

A double murder, right in the middle of a
public park, in all likelihood with Vlasov’s face staring out from
the front page of every newspaper in the state. Oh, the fine times
the Russians could have had with a little disaster like that—no
wonder Guinness had hauled the body such a distance, and on
foot.

With a car he could have left the damn thing
in the middle of the Nevada desert, so he had to have been on foot.
Better than half a mile, carting a corpse. Very considerate of him,
especially since he had had to manage it with a bullet in him. It
must have taken forever.

From about 4:00 P.M. on, which was as soon as
he could get away from the coils of the law, Tuttle had met every
plane coming into the San Francisco Airport from Los Angeles.
Guinness was on the nine o’clock PSA flight, and he really looked
like hell.

At first Tuttle had thought he might be
carrying a package or something under his coat, but then he noticed
that there was no arm in the sleeve. The arm was in a sling that
seemed in some way immobilized against his body.

In basic training they always told you the
story about the Spartan boy who concealed a fox under his cloak and
then, rather than make a spectacle of himself, let the thing claw
his guts out. You were supposed to be very tough in this business,
very much the hard nose, and every once in a while it did prove
necessary to go walking gamely past a hostile guard with your leg
broken in four places; but one wondered what Guinness could think
he had to prove.

Behind the casualness of his gait there was a
willful precision, a care that every movement should stay in
control, as if it were beneath him to suffer. His eyes looked
weary, though, and his face was the color of wet paper. Tuttle’s
presence didn’t seem to register at all until he was almost
directly in front of him.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked,
putting out a hand. Guinness didn’t take it and didn’t answer. He
only frowned slightly, as if Tuttle had cracked some tasteless
joke. He didn’t say anything, as a matter of record, until they
were in the car and going over the cloverleaf that fed airport
traffic back onto the Bayshore Freeway. And even then he wasn’t
precisely what you could call chatty.

“Will you watch it?” Guinness had snapped as
they went around the curve, perhaps a trifle faster than necessary.
“I don’t much care to have my arm smashed flat just because you
feel like burning rubber.”

“Sorry.” Tuttle eased his foot down a little
on the brake pedal and began to check for cross traffic as they
came out of their turn. “Vlasov get a shot off?”

“One.”

He didn’t go back to his own hotel—Tuttle
didn’t think he was in any shape to be left alone and so talked him
into spending the night on the extra bed in his motel room—and
Tuttle, as usual, did most of the drinking. But gradually
Guinness’s disposition began to improve and Tuttle found out what
had happened. Or, at least, as much as he was going to.

The bullet, it seemed, had entered just to
one side of Guinness’s breastbone and had bounced merrily along
over his rib cage before it exited and finally buried itself just
below the right bicep, flush up against the bone. Guinness had been
lucky: The bone was bruised but unbroken, not even cracked, and
none of the major arteries had been touched. Otherwise, out there
alone in the middle of the night, it was a pretty safe bet he would
have bled to death.

Jesus, a half mile carrying a dead body slung
over his shoulder and all shot up like that. Guinness said he had
had to put Vlasov down and rest every few hundred yards to keep
from fainting. Not good for too many laughs, that kind of thing,
not with a bullet in you.

“You should have said something—we have our
connections, you know, How the hell did you get yourself pieced
back together down there without bringing the cops in on it?”

Guinness only shrugged. And, true, it had
been a stupid question; hell, the man had lived in L.A. for over a
year. No doubt he knew half a dozen doctors who would forget their
civic duty for an extra hundred bucks.

In The Business it was considered a breach of
etiquette to inquire too closely into how a job had gone. If
Guinness had wanted to talk about it, that would have been one
thing, but he hadn’t. So it seemed unlikely that Tuttle would ever
find out precisely what had passed between Vlasov and the man who
had killed him. It would have been worth something to know.

But, God knows, Guinness wasn’t going to tell
him. Guinness had hardly talked at all, and what he had said didn’t
precisely make worlds of sense.

“Vlasov wanted to die,” he had almost
whispered, as if he were saying it to himself. And then he had
looked up at Tuttle, as if noticing his presence for the first
time, and had smiled a peculiar ironic little smile. “If he could
have killed me first, that would have made everything perfect, but
I wasn’t the main target. He brought all of us—you, me, the
Russians, every player in the game—all down on him at once, and one
or the other of us could be counted on to take him off. He planned
it that way; he was too moral a man for it to have had any other
ending. You have to admire that kind of integrity.”

Maybe Guinness did, but as far as Tuttle was
concerned it was strictly off the wall. It made you wonder how
Guinness had managed to survive as long as he had, this not really
being a line of work that was very kind to the philosophical
type.

Anyway, the next morning, having refused all
offers of breakfast, the former front runner on San Mateo County’s
Most Wanted Fugitives list walked out through the door of Tuttle’s
room at the Casa Belmont to resume what one supposed had to be
called “normal life,” or what from now on would have to pass for
it.

But at least he was no longer an object of
official interest to the police. It had taken some doing, but
finally Creon had been persuaded of the wisdom of canceling his
a.p.b. and regarding the investigation into the death of Louise
Harrison Guinness as concluded. He hadn’t liked it much, even after
Tuttle had produced the ice pick with the blood that would type
with the victim’s and the fingerprints that belonged to somebody
whom he was rather pointedly told was none of his affair.

It seemed he had had his heart set on busting
Guinness. And even forgetting the murder rap, there was still the
small matter of assault, grand theft firearm, and possibly even
kidnapping, all committed against the person of one Herbert L.
Ganjemi, late of the Oakland Police. Ganjemi, for all of being a
dumb shit, was a friend and a brother officer, and you just didn’t
drop a friend of Creon’s into a laundry basket, steal his piece,
and then go on about your business. After all, there was the
dignity of the Law to be considered.

“Look, pal,” Tuttle had answered, rising up
out of his chair and leaning over his hands on Creon’s desk, their
faces not more than half a yard apart, “the government is not
interested in having its citizens hassled by every small town cop
who happens to think he’s Matt Dillon. If Dr. Guinness is in any
way molested, if he gets so much as a traffic ticket any time in
the next hundred years, you are going to find this two bit
department of yours picked over like the underwear in Macy’s
basement. You don’t know what harassment is until you’ve gone a few
rounds with us, and when we’re done you won’t be able to find a job
as a warehouse guard in Hermosillo, Mexico. We want the man left
alone, you got that?”

Well, Creon had toughed it up a lot and
yelled about how nobody, but nobody, could tell him how to do his
job—as if an asshole like that would have the faintest idea how to
do his job—but eventually the message had filtered through.
Guinness was off the hook. There would even be an item in the local
papers about a new official theory that the murder had been
committed by a transient, whom the police had every hope of
eventually apprehending.

And that was that. Guinness had taken an
apartment not far from his office, his house was unpadlocked and up
for sale, and he was back at his job. Everything seemed to be back
to normal.

Except, what was normal anymore? Guinness was
behaving like a zombie. For the past two weeks he had lived his
life in precisely three rooms: his apartment, his office at school,
and the mausoleum in Colma, where his wife occupied a space in the
next to the bottom tier of the south wall. He would sit there for
hours, four or five times a week, staring at the blank square of
marble to which the little steel plate reading “Louise Harrison
Guinness/1944- 1977” had not yet been bolted. It was a grief that
seemed too large for the exclusive use of just one little mortal,
and God knows what else the man was mourning beyond his late
missus. He was like someone haunted by ghosts, willing them up from
their several graves out of a recognition that he deserved to be
tormented.

The night Guinness came back, he had crawled
onto the spare motel room bed and lain there in his clothes, not
even bothering to take down the spread. It made Tuttle nervous;
every few hours he would wake up and every time Guinness would
still be awake, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. You
could see his eyeballs glistening in the faint light that came in
through an open space between the curtains. Guinness might not have
slept at all that night.

Was he sleeping at all now? It was a safe bet
Tuttle wasn’t; his buddy Prescott had seen to that.

“Listen, Tuttle,” he had said over the phone,
in that maddening Harvard Yard accent of his, “we made a deal. You
want me to go waltzing into the Old Man’s office and tell him that
you’re the only man to fill the slot he’s owed me since Kaufmann’s
heart attack? You want me to ooze all over the place about how we
just can’t live without you another second? Then you deliver
Guinness. I want him, Tuttle, and I don’t care if you have to wheel
him in trussed up like a turkey. We’ve got lots of shrinks around
here and it won’t take them any time at all to put his head back
together enough so that he can hold a gun. After all, how sane does
he have to be?”

Tuttle made a face at himself in the glass
wall of the telephone booth, thinking about Kaufmann’s heart attack
and wondering if the actuarial figures for people in Prescott’s
department were likely to be all that much of an improvement.

“I keep telling you, Al. You can’t rush a man
like this. Four days now, and every damn day I’ve asked him the
same question and he’s given me the same answer. He says that he
doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life having to look over his
shoulder, and it might even be that he means it. What the hell do
you expect me to do? I can’t hang around out here forever; the
Vlasov business was cleared up a long time ago.”

On the other end of the line there was
silence, broken only by the faint sound of a pencil eraser being
tapped against the surface of a glass topped desk some three
thousand miles away.

“Tuttle?” came the answer at last. “Tuttle,
he hasn’t slammed the door in your face or anything like that, has
he? I mean, he hasn’t threatened to string your guts out to dry;
he’s still talking to you, isn’t he?” Tuttle had to admit, yes,
Guinness was still talking to him. They were almost—well—almost
friends.

“Well then? Isn’t that answer enough for you?
You said it yourself: once a shooter always a shooter. He’ll come
around. He just wants to stew over his grievances a while longer.
Ten to one, by now he already knows he’s coming back and just isn’t
ready to admit it.

“Don’t you have some vacation time coming,
Tuttle?”

“Yes.” Tuttle nodded sullenly at his
reflection in the glass. He could see what was building. “Yes, I’ve
got two weeks.”

“Then enjoy yourself in sunny California.
Have a big time. Ride the trolley cars and eat all the Chinese food
you can hold. When you come back, I’ll expect you to have a
beautiful tan and Raymond Guinness with a ring through his
nose.”

The line went dead. Tuttle hung up the
receiver with a shade more violence than is strictly good for the
equipment.

That had been—what?—ten days ago? Tuttle fed
another thirty-five cents into the soft drink machine and pushed
the button for grape soda. Grape soda turned out to have been a
judicious choice. A little sweet, perhaps, but it was cold and this
time they hadn’t left the gas out.

“Come on, man,” he whispered under his
breath. “It’s your karma; you can’t hold out forever.”