Simeon Grist Mystery - 04 - Incinerator Read online

  She took another belt of whiskey, and I snuck a look at her ankles. They weren’t locked together. “He got more and more vague,” she said over the rim of her glass. “He stopped caring if they shaved him in the morning. He began to call me by my mother’s name.” She paused again, looking at the pattern cut into the glass. “Then he began to call me Joshua.”

  “Who’s Joshua?” The sun was doing a depressive slant through the windows, and I’d stopped counting the hours, even at a hundred dollars per. She hadn’t gotten up to turn on the lights, and the tasteful rosewood furniture was beginning to disappear into the walls.

  “There wasn’t any Joshua,” she said in a muffled voice. “Joshua was the name he and my mother had chosen for me if I’d been a boy.”

  I waited for another piece of upholstery to fade and listened to my watch ticking. “He invented a son,” I said to animate the silence.

  “He reeled in the past,” she said, “and cast it out again, and when his hook came back to him, it had an imaginary son at the end of it.”

  “You.”

  “You can’t imagine how I hated it. ‘Joshua this, Joshua that,’ he’d say. ‘Joshua guard the money.’ I mean, I answered to the name anyway, but I went to bed every night and before I fell asleep, I killed the brother I’d never had, over and over and over again. God, if you could be punished for imaginary murder.” She drained the whiskey.

  “You can’t. Except in your imagination.” I held out my empty glass, and she took it.

  “If you could, my father would have outlived me,” she said. She seemed to have forgotten that she was about to make the economical trip to the bar. “There I sat at his bed, me, Joshua Winston, learning the business.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She gazed at me, gray-eyed, through the gloom for so long that it made me feel uncomfortable. “Are you,” she finally said, almost grudgingly. “Yes, maybe you are.” She got up at last.

  “Miss Winston. I may not be rich, but I’ve got parents.”

  “You’re an actual person,” she said, halfway to the bar. “Aren’t you?”

  “On my better days.”

  Stopping, she treated me to another mini-nod. “So he got worse,” she said. The bar gave her a silent hello, and she ignored it. “The ludicrous thing was that he got stronger physically as he got weaker mentally,” she said, both glasses, hers and mine, in hand. “After the second series of strokes he could barely lift an arm, but his mind was sharp. Later, when his mind was going, his body came back to him. Toward the end, he could have qualified for the Olympic hurdles, but he couldn’t have found the starting line.” She covered the rest of the distance to the bar in the same straight, economical course; Columbus had sailed that straight for the Indies, steering dead-on for China. Of course, he hadn’t known that a continent had drifted into his way. Something very large had obviously drifted into Annabelle Winston’s way.

  “Therefore, the male nurse,” I said as she poured.

  “Harvey Melnick,” she said, “may his soul roast.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Who knows? Somebody with a resume. Big, which was important because, like I said, Daddy was strong. One gold earring. The earring should have told me.” She hoisted both glasses to show me they were full, navigated the room, and sat on the couch.

  “There’s nothing you can do about it now.” I took the beer away from her.

  “I need your skills,” Annabelle Winston said in a brittle voice. Her body had gone rigid, and she sat back. “I don’t need your comfort.”

  “Hey,” I said, “we’re both real people.”

  She stood up suddenly and turned away from me. She didn’t go anywhere. She just stood there with her back to me while the light waned and the Bel Air’s highly paid birds twittered and whistled outside. “Excuse me,” she finally said.

  “Excused. Take your time.”

  “There isn’t time,” she said. “I want the shithead nailed.” Her back was as rigid as rigor mortis.

  “Despite the gold earring, you hired Harvey,” I said to her back. Then I reached out and tugged at her arm.

  She swiveled as though her arm were a rope and she were a floating boat at its other end. There was moisture on her face. “Daddy needed someone twenty-four hours a day,” she said defensively. “At night, we could use women. In the daytime, we needed a man.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted to go to the store.” Slowly, grudgingly, she sat down beside me.

  I listened to the words again, sifting them for sense. “What store?”

  “The first one.” She gave her cheeks a proprietary little wipe. “The little grocery store. We’d sold it years ago, of course. He’d wake up in the morning saying he’d forgotten to take inventory. Inventory, inventory. He had to count the cans, he said. Every can of soup was twelve cents in profit. By then he was worth maybe four hundred million dollars. He’d lost all that. Mentally, I mean. He was back in the time when every twelve cents could be squirreled away for little Joshua’s education. He kept talking about the day he’d be able to buy my mother a fur coat. ‘She should be wrapped in fur,’ he said. When my mother died, we had an apartment with a walk-in freezer that was used for nothing but to store her fur coats. My mother had more fur coats than the Russian imperial family.”

  “So Harvey took him to the store every day,” I said. “But there wasn’t any store.”

  “I bought one.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She took another cigarette from the box and lit it. “I bought a store. The one he’d started in was gone, but I bought one near it. In a black area, just like the first one. It opened at nine, about half an hour before my father arrived. It closed half an hour after he finished taking inventory, the minute we knew he was around the corner. We never sold anything, of course. I wrote it off as a business loss. The IRS never asked a question. Anyway, the costs were nothing. All we ever really needed was someone to dust the cans and replace the meat and vegetables once in a while. After we gave them away.”

  “Why didn’t you leave it open? Sell stuff?”

  “His inventory would have been off,” she said. “He had an inventory from some day in the past, a Tuesday or whatever, stuck in his head like Moses’ tablets. At first we operated it like a real store. We bought and sold. But he got so upset because the numbers didn’t work out that one day he knocked everything off the shelves and sat in one of the aisles, crying. That night I made him write the whole inventory down. It took hours, but I didn’t mind because it was like being with my father again, before … well, before. He remembered everything, every tiny detail. After he went to sleep, we worked all night to stock that store. By the time he arrived the next morning, the inventory matched. I’d made goddamn sure it matched. We kept it that way for more than a year.”

  “A museum.”

  “The world’s first grocery museum. The last, too, I suppose. And I was the curator.”

  “You must have loved him very much.”

  She stubbed out the unsmoked cigarette. “Don’t make me get up again,” she said. “He’s still alive, for the moment, at least. I still love him. How could I not love him? This was a man who bought a hundred Christmas trees every year, and all the presents under them, and had them delivered to poor families in Chicago. And he was a Jew, for Christ’s sake.”

  “How did he know what to buy?” I asked, fascinated in spite of myself.

  “He hired Santas and put them into the worst neighborhoods. The Santas had big bellies with little tape recorders hidden in them. After they talked to a particularly sweet little kid, the Santas were supposed to ask them their full names and where they lived. On Christmas Eve, Daddy or one of his Christmas crews would show up, all dressed like Santa, with the whole shebang. The tree, all the presents the kid had asked for, something practical for the parents. He made a ceremony of telling Mommy and me about it the next morning. Christmas morning. He’d drink his eggnog with cognac and tell
us about Christmas Eve. That was our Christmas. Hearing Daddy talk about what happened after they knocked on the doors in their red suits and their white beards, and what the people said and how the kids acted. It was the kids who got to him. Sometimes he cried like a baby. They really killed him. Oh, Lord,” she said, getting up again. “Oh, Lord. Just sit there and don’t say anything.”

  She had her back turned to me, her shoulders stiff and high. I tried not to say anything and failed. “You never got anything for Christmas?”

  “My whole life was Christmas,” she said without turning around. “I was Santa’s daughter. I was one of the elves.” She lowered her head, and her shoulders began to shake.

  She needed something to do. “I’d like another beer,” I said.

  Annabelle caught her breath with a rasping sound. “Easily arranged,” she said. She was herself again, or close enough to fool someone who wasn’t paying attention. “This is the last, I think. Shall I call down for more?” She went to the bar and opened the door of the refrigerator.

  “This is it. I’ve got an evening in front of me.”

  “Lucky you,” she said. “I’ve got a sleeping pill.” I would have traded my evening for her sleeping pill. It was nothing I looked forward to. She uncapped the beer, reached for a glass, dropped the cap into the wastebasket with a metallic ping of precision, blinked, and said, “So we got Harvey, and Harvey took him to the store every morning. That was Harvey’s whole job. Not such a hard job, would you think? And one day Harvey didn’t come back, and neither did Daddy. We hired the world to find him. Hundreds of people. Then I got the call from L.A. saying some bum has been burned half to death and he’s got a MedicAlert bracelet, the bracelet Daddy wore because of the Alzheimer’s, identifying him as Abraham Winston. Do I think the bracelet might have been stolen? Well, I don’t know where Daddy is, so my first impulse was to believe that the bracelet was wherever he was. And I came here, and it took me an hour to recognize him. He didn’t look like Santa Claus any more.”

  She sat down on the couch, and both she and the upholstery sighed. The bottle trembled in her hand. “Will you help me?”

  “I thought we’d settled that,” I said. “I’m going to try.”

  “Oh,” she said, and she leaned forward until her forehead touched her knees. “Oh.”

  I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Was his face burned?”

  “No,” Baby Winston said, without straightening. “Only the lower two thirds of his body. But they were third-degree burns.” She was talking to her lap.

  “Then why did it take you an hour to recognize him?”

  She remained folded forward, tighter than a jackknife. “Let’s hope you never have to find out,” she said.

  3

  Al the Red

  That evening I had a prearranged date with Hammond. The bar called the Red Dog glares out onto a block of Hollywood Boulevard that only the most foolhardy walk at night—the most foolhardy and cops. Not that the two categories are mutually exclusive.

  The Red Dog has a corny sawdust floor and a sixties jukebox, recycling hits from the Summer of Love at numbing volume. The latest hits reach cops last, and it’s probably a good thing. Otherwise they’d be able to figure out what the rest of us are up to.

  Hammond had a red kerchief tied crookedly around his head when I walked in. It wasn’t a good sign. His broad face, shadowed with a day’s worth of whiskers, gleamed with sweat and malice, and he had a drink in each of his ham-sized hands.

  “God damn,” he said. He darted a glance at me and missed by about a yard. “I was afraid I’d have to drink both of these.”

  “What a fate,” I said, taking the nearer of the two. It was sweating more heavily than Hammond. After all the beer I didn’t want it, but it seemed like good policy to slow Hammond down. “Nice hat, Al.”

  “I’m a pirate,” he announced vehemently. “Al the Red.” He looked around for someone to contradict him.

  “Shiver me timbers. Where’s your parrot?” The whiskey tasted like recycled perspiration: flat, malodorous, and for some reason slightly salty.

  “Don’t need no fucking parrot. Parrots got lice.”

  “That a fact?”

  “Every parrot I ever knew. Al the Red is a bad guy, but he doesn’t have lice. Lice, they’ll eat your peg leg right out from under you.”

  “I thought that was termites.”

  “Termites eat houses,” Hammond said with leaden patience. “Lice eat peg legs. Termites I got. They ate my whole fucking house already.”

  “Al,” I said as gently as possible. “You’ve still got your house.”

  “Who said anything about houses?” Hammond asked belligerently. “Al the Red lives on a ship.” He tugged the kerchief to a more rakish angle. “What the fuck good is a house? Can you take it anywhere? Huh? Can you sail your house into a harbor and fire cannons at the civilians?” He drained his drink, leaned toward me, and tapped the back of my hand meaningfully. It felt like a hammer. His eyes narrowed. “Can a house do twenty knots?”

  It was going to be a long night.

  “Where’s your crew?” I asked, and instantly kicked myself under the table. It was the wrong thing to ask.

  “Deserted,” Red Al said. “Every man jack of them. Every woman jack, too. Desertion. That’s the trouble with houses. They’re too easy to leave.” His eyes closed heavily, and he rested his big forehead on the rim of his glass. I glanced around for help and didn’t find any. Cops avoided my eyes. Our table reminded me of the drop of penicillin in the center of a petri dish: The area around it was a vacuum, vacated by the swarms who had withdrawn to the walls, cops and cop groupies carrying on earnest conversations over the din of the music— by now it was Sly & the Family Stone. I searched for the black cop who might have dropped that particular quarter and didn’t find him. He was hiding. Like everybody else.

  Hammond lifted his head. The circular impression of the glass was printed on his forehead, like a target. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth, and bellowed, “PEPPI!”

  Peppi, the barmaid, was as butch as Hammond but a lot smaller. I’d never been sure which of the two I’d rather fight. She materialized at a safe distance from the table and said, “Yeah?” She’d traded in her trademark black net stockings for a pair of silvery Spandex tights under six inches of black cloth. It hadn’t been a wise fashion decision. From the waist down, she looked like two fish trapped in a miniskirt.

  “Al the Red is thirsty,” Hammond said in an eminently reasonable tone of voice. “So is his first mate.”

  “Comin’ up.” Peppi wheeled to go, and Hammond leaned forward and grabbed a fistful of her short skirt. Peppi stopped shorter than a fishing weight at the end of a snarled line. “Hey,” she snarled.

  “Peppi,” Hammond said. “Tell you what. Make a woman of you.”

  “I’ve already taken that course,” Peppi said. “I changed majors.”

  “Try a real man,” Hammond said. He gave her a lop sided leer.

  “Find one,” Peppi said, tugging her skirt free with red-knuckled hands. “Just find one.”

  Hammond directed his gaze toward her silver knees and winked appreciatively. He was even drunker than I’d thought. “Great gams,” he said inaccurately.

  “You,” Peppi said, looking at me. “You. First mate.”

  I looked up.

  “Take care of him,” she said.

  “Me?” Hammond said, pounding the table with a fist slightly smaller than West Virginia. “Take care of Al the Red? Nobody born can take care of Al the Red.”

  “Yeah,” said Peppi, who had never liked me. “That’s why I picked him.”

  Hammond gave up. “Grog,” he said. “Posthaste.” Peppi marched off, and he looked up at me balefully, “Am I making an asshole of myself?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, fuck it,” he said. “And fuck you, too, while I’m at it. I won’t remember in the morning. Funny what you remember and what you forget.”
/>   I agreed that it was funny and then tried to do some business.

  “Listen,” I shouted over Gary Lewis and the Playboys or someone like that, “what do you know about this guy who’s setting fire—”

  “The paper plates,” Hammond said. “Did I tell you about the paper plates?”

  I shelved my question and shook my head. The paper plates were a new wrinkle.

  “I get home,” Hammond said, taking the glass from my hand and draining it in a single gulp, “and the door’s open.” He looked down at the two empty glasses in front of him. “Where’s the goddamn grog?”

  “Coming.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with grog. It takes too long. I don’t know how Francis Drake did it, waiting all day for his fucking grog. Do you think Francis Drake ever got home and found the door open?”

  “No,” I said. “His boat would have sunk.”

  Hammond licked a finger and made an imaginary mark in the air. “One for you,” he said. “Problem was, I was living in a house, not a boat. I mean, what’s it supposed to sink into, the lawn? Nothing ever sank into a lawn.”

  “Newspapers do. Every morning.”

  “So I get home,” he said, ignoring me, “maybe eleven o’clock, maybe later. I mean, I’d been out drinking, but nothing new. Did it every night. Same as you. Everybody does.”

  So far, except for the paper plates, we were on familiar territory. Everybody didn’t, of course, but most cops did. They had to. Whiskey was the anesthetic that made it possible for them to get home and pretend for their children’s sake that the world was sane.