Simeon Grist Mystery - 04 - Incinerator Read online

  “If I do,” I said, handing him a hundred and ninety bucks, “you could get a terrific chance to learn about flambé.”

  9

  Mirrors and Hindsight

  The rearview mirror was more or less empty.

  It had been more or less empty for four days.

  It was an old rearview mirror. Alice, my car, was almost thirty, and I had no reason to believe that the mirror wasn’t original. That made it almost as old as Eleanor. Some of the silvering had given way to a kind of powdery blackness, and there was a little continent of black, shaped vaguely like Australia, in the upper left-hand corner. The rearview mirror was falling apart. Eleanor, on the other hand, was in great shape.

  I’d spent most of the last four days either watching the rearview mirror or thinking about Eleanor. The two activities had been equally productive. I had decided to replace the mirror, and Eleanor, at long last, had decided to replace me.

  I pulled into a hot, flat little cul-de-sac in the Valley and waited for nothing.

  Eleanor and I had met more than ten years ago, at UCLA. I’d been finishing a master’s degree in English lit, and she’d been a visitor from the Department for Asian Studies, looking into early British translators of classic Chinese novels. At the time, The Dream of the Red Chamber, probably the best of the bunch, was my favorite book in the world, and I’d had the pleasure of introducing her to David Hawkes’s wonderful modern English version, which he calls The Story of the Stone. Six months later, we were living together.

  Within a year, she had threatened and cajoled me out of smoking a pack and a half a day, and she’d managed somehow to get me out of my armchair and onto the jogging track. In doing it, she taught me a great secret: I had never known it could be pleasant to perspire. I’d never understood that it could feel good to have aching muscles. I hiked. I ran. I surfed. I dropped thirty pounds. I swam happily in the love of a good woman. I also found a vocation, after almost nine years of meandering in the Halls of Academe, seeking initials to string, like magic talismans, after my name.

  It began when a cokehead, his dipswitches permanently fused in the manic configuration, dropped a sweet Taiwanese girl named Jennie Chu off the roof of one of the residence halls. Jennie had been a pianist and a gymnast with a shy smile and a wicked sense of humor, and she’d been Eleanor’s closest friend. She died by mistake. The cokehead couldn’t tell Asians apart. As my contribution to Eleanor’s recovery process, I worked out who did it and delivered him to the police with his elbows broken. I later regretted the elbows.

  Eleanor discovered the dreadful little shack in Topanga Canyon and fixed it up. We lived happily for a few years, me practicing my new job part-time while I earned a few more useless degrees, and even teaching for a couple of semesters, and she working on her writing and turning out her first book, Two Fit, about how couples could help each other to become healthy. It sold like radishes. Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, I started fooling around, stupid, pleasureless, meaningless betrayals with people whose names I barely knew. Eleanor put up with it for a while, and then she didn’t. She moved to Venice on her royalties, and we entered into a new stage of the relationship. It didn’t make either of us particularly happy, but it was better than nor seeing each other at all. She remained the most important person in my life.

  And now there was Burt.

  Time, as everybody says nowadays, is relative. Sitting there in that stifling cul-de-sac, sending mental letter bombs to Burt and watching two Chicano kids squabble over a garden hose, the three minutes I’d promised myself that I would wait for nothing to happen seemed to take a decade. At two minutes and forty seconds, I decided to cheat. I started Alice and pulled out of the little circle of faded houses, making a right onto Sherman Way and cruising in Alice’s stately fashion past the hospital in which Abraham Winston had died.

  I’d been cheating on the surveillance times quite a lot lately. The four days had passed like sludge. The waiting, as infuriating as it would have been under any circumstances, was made all the more unendurable by the fact that I couldn’t pull myself away from watching the bloody pot. As a result, all the nothing that I experienced took a lot longer to happen. I felt like a particle physicist put on permanent standby until the elusive graviton—the Snark of subatomic particles—popped out of the void to explain why his feet remained anchored to the ground. And it didn’t.

  Even during the brief interludes in which I pursued my own business, it took five times as long to do anything because I had to drag myself through all the double-backs, loop routes, feints, detours, and parking stalls that make up the vocabulary of checking for a tail. With my Thomas Brothers map book open in my lap, I turned into every dead end and cul-de-sac I passed, waited for three minutes—or, lately, two and a half—and then came back out again with my eye on that blemished and blistering rearview mirror. So I drove and fretted and fretted and drove again and consoled myself with the knowledge that at least no one else had been burned to death.

  Wallowing through the slog of time, I knocked on more doors to apartments overlooking the various death scenes and got nothing. I’d talked to the homeless, to the extent that anyone can talk to the homeless. I’d distributed fifteen or sixteen of Annabelle Winston’s twenties, hoping for information, and purchased nothing more than fifteen or sixteen vicarious drinking binges. I’d talked to Eleanor and Hammond on the phone. More consolation: No one seemed to be following them, either.

  By the third day, I was so desperate that I’d let Hammond and Schultz, who had been surgically attached to Hammond, talk me into setting up a phony meet. The idea was to pick someplace relatively conspicuous and let the cops station half a dozen watchers in the neighborhood, three on wheels, three on foot. The meet was set for 7:00 P.M., by which time some anonymous optimist in a uniform had decided that rush hour would have died down. With an unpleasant prickling on the back of my neck, I drove to the location—a motel in Santa Monica, nicely positioned at the end of a dead-end street off Ocean Boulevard—went to room 22, as directed, and knocked.

  Willick opened the door. He opened it very wide, as though he wanted to ensure good sight lines from the street.

  “I was hoping it would be you,” I said, fighting down a sudden desire to burst into tears. “This is very reassuring.”

  Willick beamed. He was wearing the worst set of plainclothes I’d ever seen. His tie was skinnier than pasta, and it made his face seem even fatter. His sport coat was the precise shade of green that electric eels are supposed to assume just before they give you thirty volts. His jeans were pressed and fresh from the laundry, and they were so short that you could see the white socks above his big black cop shoes. “Nice disguise,” I said.

  “The jacket’s my brother-in-law’s,” he said proudly.

  “I didn’t know you had a brother-in-law on the force,” I said, waiting for him to close the damn door.

  His smile slipped a little. “Whole family’s on the force,” he said.

  I used my foot to close the door for him. “That explains a lot,” I said. “Have we got watchers?”

  “They’re all over the place,” Willick said enthusiastically, turning to the window. “See? The guy fixing the Coke machine—”

  I slapped his hand away from the blinds, and he yanked it back and flapped it in the air a few times to cool it, looking like a little kid who was deciding whether to cry.

  “It’s not polite to point,” I said, smoothing the blinds down. “How long are we supposed to be here?”

  “Until we get the all-clear,” Willick said. He blew on the back of his hand, caught me looking at him, and put the hand behind his back.

  “And how are we supposed to do that?”

  “On this,” Willick said, hefting a ten-pound walkie-talkie in his other hand. It said PROPERTY LAPD on the side in enormous yellow stenciled letters. They looked bigger than skywriting. “It’s already on the right frequency.”

  “Good, good,” I said, wondering if this
were Hammond’s little joke. “Be terrible to be on the wrong one. You know, someone could be listening.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, giving me the ultimate reassurance. “I set it myself.” I think I smiled at him. At any rate, I felt my cheeks creak.

  “What about that?” I pointed to the phone, prominently positioned on the table between the beds. “See that?”

  “Oh,” Willick said. He didn’t say it loudly.

  “Might have been easier,” I said.

  “Well,” Willick said. He lowered the hand with the walkie-talkie as though it were suddenly too heavy.

  “Wouldn’t have required you to get up here carrying something that says LAPD on it, either.”

  “I hid it under my coat,” Willick said. He showed me how he’d hidden it under his coat. Only the letters LAPD showed.

  “You’re doing great,” I said.

  The thing snapped, crackled, and popped. Willick almost dropped it trying to tug it free of his coat. He’d snagged it on the orange Paisley lining. I helped him get it clear and then took it away from him. He stretched out a white, margarine-coated hand and closed his fingers on air, a good fourteen inches from the walkie-talkie.

  “Phoenix One to Phoenix Three,” said a gravelly voice.

  “Al,” I said. “Al, this isn’t funny.”

  “Wrong,” Hammond said. “It wouldn’t be funny if you weren’t clean. But you’re clean, so it’s hilarious.”

  “How many cars?” Willick was watching with a wounded expression.

  “We got three.”

  “All plain?”

  “What, are you kidding?” Hammond sounded aggrieved. “Sure, they’re plain.”

  “Radios?”

  “What do you think this is?”

  “I think this is a Triple-E ticket for Disneyland, is what I think it is. Schultz has to be Phoenix Two, right?”

  Hammond grunted electronically.

  “I want the cars to do a circle. The whole block, then the block beyond. I want them to do it twice. I want the walkers to do the same. And Phoenix,” I said. “That’s clever. The bird that rises from its own ashes. What if he’s got a shortwave, Al?”

  “He doesn’t know the frequency.”

  “There’s a telephone in this very room,” I said. “Right here, not six feet from me. Don’t tell me about shortwaves, and don’t tell me about Phoenix. And don’t use this again. When the cars and the walkers have done a double circle, call me on the room phone. Have you got someone there who knows how to dial?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Hammond said.

  “Right,” I said. “Sorry. I forgot that Schultz was there.”

  I turned off the walkie-talkie. Willick murmured in genteel protest. The whole family was on the force, I remembered. Just for insurance, I took the walkie-talkie into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet.

  “Settle down,” I said, as he fished it out. He looked at it, streaming water, with an expression of unadulterated terror on his face.

  “I checked this out myself,” he said. “I signed my name. I’m responsible.”

  The bathroom towels were white and fluffy, and I tossed him one. “So dry it,” I said. “And work on your heart rate. We’re here until the phone rings.”

  The phone rang five minutes later. Willick was sulking on the other bed, and I beat him to it. “You’re clean,” Dr. Schultz announced smoothly.

  “And you’re an idiot,” I said. “There are twenty things wrong with the way this was handled.”

  “We were going for broke,” Schultz said, unruffled. “If he’d been behind you, we would have had him. If not, no harm done.”

  “Thanks for the information. It would have been nice to have had it ahead of time.”

  “We couldn’t be sure how you’d behave, could we?” Schultz was working on silky. What he didn’t say was, We decided to make you a target, see if we could draw the son of a bitch out.

  “Is Al on the line?”

  “He could be. Would you like him to be?”

  “No,” I said in a tone of voice that sent Willick’s eye brows skyward with the force of the space shuttle. “I only asked because I wanted to propose to you.”

  There was a little muffled urgency, and then Hammond said, “Yeah?”

  “You’re both there?”

  “I’m here,” Schultz said serenely.

  “Al?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. I dumped Willick’s walkie-talkie into the John. Write it off as a loss, but don’t charge him with it.” Willick sat upright on the bed, looking ridiculously grateful.

  “That it?” Hammond asked.

  “No,” I said. “Your thread to the Incinerator, to use Dr. Schultz’s memorable phrase, is hanging by a thread. You do this to me once more, and you’ve lost me. I’m in the Des Moines Holiday Inn, Al.”

  “He’ll follow you,” Hammond said.

  “Interesting time to bring that up,” I said.

  “Simeon,” Al said.

  “Your cars, your walkers,” I said, cutting him off. “They’ve done two circles?”

  “Like you said.”

  “Tell them to do another two. Then phone.” I hung up.

  Willick was watching me as though he expected me to sprout razors from the ends of my fingers and go for his fat throat.

  “Alone at last,” I said to him, settling back onto my bed. Willick didn’t look reassured. He just mopped at his walkie-talkie.

  When I finally left, about twenty minutes later, it took me more than three hours to get home. I’d refused to speak to either Hammond or Dr. Schultz. I got partway up the coast and then turned around and headed back to Santa Monica, twice. I bought a pair of running shoes I didn’t need, watching the street so closely that I got the wrong size. I took every switchback and cul-de-sac I could find. It was after eleven when, reassured at last, I pulled into the turnaround at the foot of my driveway and climbed out of Alice.

  There was a full moon. It was bright enough to show me that the flag on my mailbox was upright.

  There was a sprig of some kind of plant in the mailbox. It smelled sweet. I don’t know anything much about plants, but it smelled a familiar kind of sweet. I tossed the sprig onto Alice’s front seat and trudged up the driveway to the house. Halfway up, wearing my too-large new shoes, I stumbled over the tripwire that I’d set up myself. I got a nice mouthful of loose dirt.

  I had a rotten night, full of dreams that were all fire.

  With the burn hospital receding into the rearview mirror, I headed over the Sepulveda Pass toward Bel Air. The only times I felt I could drive safely without one eye epoxied to the rearview mirror was when I went to the Bel Air Hotel to talk to Annabelle Winston. After all, as far as the Incinerator was concerned, that was something I was supposed to be doing. I almost wanted him to be watching.

  The meeting was the kind that you have just to have a meeting. Its highlight came when I realized that Bobby Grant now had two earrings. In the same ear.

  “Maybe he’s given up on you,” Bobby Grant said for the second or third time. He’d been agitating to hold his million-dollar press conference. He looked clean enough to wrap around a wound.

  “Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said, smoking the same kind of cigarette that she’d forbidden Dr. Schultz. She was seated at the table, wearing a russet silk suit and a pair of jade earrings, moving some papers around. She’d had two more phones put into the room. They squatted at the corners of the desk. “Use your head. He hasn’t done anything. He’s not activated, as that little cockroach of a doctor might say.”

  “Activated,” Bobby Grant pouted. “You sound like an acting teacher I had once, except that he’d have said ‘motivated.’ ”

  “I knew you’d been an actor,” I said.

  “You did?” Bobby asked in his deepest tenor. “How?”

  “Just the way you carry yourself,” I said. Grant gave me a suspicious look.

  “What are we supposed to do?” he asked sarcastically.
“Just sit here and wait for him to set fire to someone?”

  “Yes,” I said, sitting down. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. I’ll keep doing what he expects me to do and trying to avoid what the cops want me to do, and maybe he’ll communicate with me. If he doesn’t, we wait until he burns someone. Then, if he doesn’t contact me, you can hold your press conference.”

  Bobby gave the suggestion 25 percent of his lower lip. It made him look like a fountain. “Maybe we could just do a release,” he said. “Something about progress. Picture of the two of you.”

  “No,” Annabelle Winston said without looking up from her papers. Her father had been flown home for his funeral, and she’d accompanied the body, been photographed in a veil at the cemetery, chaired an emergency stockholders’ meeting, and flown back to Los Angeles, and she looked as if it had been a week since she’d walked around the block. In her spare time, she’d been running the business.

  “What’s this?” I asked her, holding up the sprig that I’d found in my mailbox the night before.

  Annabelle turned the page she’d been reading facedown before she reached up and took the small piece of greenery, which was in mid-wilt. She sniffed it, then shrugged her disinterest. “It’s some kind of herb.”

  “What is this?” Bobby Grant asked the heavens. “A segment of The French Chef?”

  “Shut up, Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said absently. She rubbed the leaves between her fingers, bruising but not crushing them, and then moved her fingers back and forth beneath her nose. “Fennel,” she said. “So?”

  “So maybe nothing,” I said, retrieving the sprig.

  Annabelle Winston inhaled the fragrance on her fingers again and then wiped them on her skirt. The woman was hell on expensive clothes. “Have you talked to anyone at your college yet?” Annabelle Winston said.

  “In twenty minutes,” I said. “Not that I expect anything.”

  “Please,” Dr. Nathan Blinkins said, rolling his eyes around the room as though he were looking for his headache. “Fire? There’s not a religion in the world that doesn’t involve fire in one way or another.”