Simeon Grist Mystery - 04 - Incinerator Page 6

  He nodded in a morose way, and I headed Alice out into the sparse Sunday traffic toward Bel Air.

  The Bel Air Hotel on a Sunday afternoon, even during the worst week of the worst October in years, looked more like a postcard than it did like a real place. I crossed the bridge over the hotel’s private stream, and one of the hotel’s private swans hissed a welcome at me. Tall sycamores shaded the grounds, their broad leaves intercepting the steady rain of ash from the latest rash of fires in the Santa Monica Mountains. Even so, there was a short Hispanic man with a wet cloth and a bucket of water cleaning the ferns. He did it slowly, meticulously, with total absorption, one frond at a time, as though there were nothing more important in the world than preventing the sensibilities of the rich from being offended by the sight of ash on the ferns.

  The rich themselves were in ample evidence, their sensibilities apparently intact. I’d forgotten which room Baby Winston was in, so I checked the dining room first. It was packed. Sunday is brunch day at the Bel Air. From about eleven until about five, rich people carefully underdress and pay someone to tousle their hair before heading for the Bel Air to compliment each other on their appearance, compare notes on doctors and domestics, talk deals, and get swozzled.

  Baby wasn’t there. That left what I should have done in the first place. Resigning myself to the possibility that I might never develop her economy of movement, I crossed the little bridge over the moat and headed for the front desk.

  “I’m sorry, but she’s not here.” The desk clerk was a motherly type in her middle forties who had chosen to celebrate Sunday by pinning a large, purple, vaguely vulpine orchid to her left lapel. The desk clerk shook her head sympathetically, and the orchid stuck its purple-specked tongue out at me.

  “Perhaps she left a message,” I said. “My name is Grist.”

  “Well, perhaps she did.” The desk clerk sounded as though she disapproved of the fact that she hadn’t thought of that on her own. “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps,” she sang to herself on a descending scale as she flipped through a stack of envelopes. “Whoopsy-daisy, here we are.” She started to hand me an envelope and then pulled back her hand and regarded me suspiciously. She pursed her mouth, working out the protocol. “Mr. Simeon Grist?” she asked, the picture of vigilance.

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then. This is for you.” She smiled maternally and handed me the envelope.

  “Look,” I said, “you did that all wrong.”

  “How do you mean, dearie?” I wondered what I’d done to become “dearie.” “Miss Winston said to give it only to Simeon Grist, and that’s what I did.” Her blue eyes were as open as the Canadian border.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Love the orchid.”

  Annabelle Winston’s note was an address: 13731 Moorpark, Sherman Oaks. Beneath that she’d written, Ten till six. There was no phone number.

  “Well, shit,” I said out loud. Sherman Oaks was a long way to drive just to quit a case.

  “Icky, icky,” said the desk clerk behind me. “There’s no need for such language.” The way she was looking at me, I was no longer “dearie.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I have no breeding at all.”

  I took Laurel Canyon up over the top of the Hollywood Hills. Rainbirds chopped at the air like machine guns, shooting out long, glittering arcs of water. People were keeping the foliage green just in case, a perfect example of baseless optimism. A really hot fire creates its own winds, and the winds always blow up. Given enough momentum, a brushfire can move up a hill at twenty miles an hour, exploding everything in its path. A nice green lawn offers about as much protection as drawing the Venetian blinds.

  The San Fernando Valley was 8 to 10 degrees hotter than the other side of the hills, making it around 100. The Santa Anas had shouldered the smog out over the Pacific, and the Valley spread below me like the world’s biggest, driest sink.

  The Moorpark address was a small hospital, obviously private, a cluster of low white buildings sheltered from the slanting afternoon sunlight by tall eucalyptus trees. There were lots of visitors’ spaces, most of them empty. I pulled Alice into one and left her there, a bright blue blemish on the asphalt.

  The starched, crinkly-white imitation nurse wrapped an expensive smile around the information that Mr. Winston was in 312 and that Miss Winston was with him and that I should follow the yellow line. Sure enough, there was a yellow line on the floor. There were also blue and red lines. Fighting down an obscure desire to find out where the red line went, I followed the yellow one down a long, arctically air-conditioned corridor and around a corner. There, seated on a black leather couch with chromium armrests, was Annabelle Winston.

  She wasn’t alone. With her was a youngish man who was clearly working at looking youngisher. His dark, wet-looking hair was combed straight back from a high, tanned forehead. His eyes were too close together, but he had fine bones and a broad mouth with a little too much lower lip. It looked as though he’d pouted once too often as a boy and the expression had stuck, just as my mother always predicted my eyes would when I crossed them. He was holding Annabelle’s hand in what seemed to be a brotherly fashion.

  The two of them got up together as I rounded the corner. Annabelle extracted her hand from the man’s grasp and said, “Mr. Grist. Thank you for coming. Have you got anything for me?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  “This is Bobby Grant,” she said. Bobby Grant stuck out a tan paw, and I shook it briefly. His white linen safari shirt had enough pockets for a very long safari indeed, and his beige pleated trousers were accented with pencil-thin green and red stripes about two inches apart. He wore lizard-skin loafers with no socks. I’ve never trusted men who don’t wear socks.

  “Bobby is the one who arranged the press conference,” Annabelle Winston said. “He handles all my West Coast PR.”

  “Good job yesterday,” I said nastily.

  “We had a real story,” Grant said in a higher voice than I’d expected. He obviously thought he was looking at me, but his eyes were focused about two inches above my head. “It’s easy when you’ve got real news,” he added, modestly minimizing his accomplishment. “A lot easier than product.” He also, I noted, sported a single gold earring, a modest loop that dangled from his left earlobe. He reached up and tugged on it, and Annabelle Winston looked on obliviously. The lesson of Harvey Melnick hadn’t taken.

  “Product?” I asked. I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

  “We put Bobby in charge of introducing our new skinless franks a year ago,” Annabelle said. She was wearing a silk suit that could have been a twin of the one she’d worn yesterday except that it was gunmetal gray. It complemented the agate eyes very nicely. “There wasn’t much space from that one.”

  “Well, wieners,” Bobby said. I wondered if he’d still call himself Bobby when he was sixty, and decided that he probably would.

  “Franks,” Annabelle Winston said absently.

  “Miss Winston,” I began.

  “Call me Annabelle,” she said. She reached up and touched my cheek. “I feel I know you well enough for that.” She wasn’t making it easy. “You’re my main hope,” she said, making it even worse.

  “I spoke to the cops today,” I said, by way of starting out.

  “And they didn’t know what you were talking about,” she said.

  “Well,” I admitted, “not at first.”

  “Even after the papers this morning?” Bobby Grant sounded personally affronted. “My God, front page of the Times. What are these people, blind?”

  “Do you see why I need you, Simeon?” Annabelle said.

  This was not going right. By now I should have been back out in the parking lot, sweet-talking Alice into starting. I drew a breath.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m quitting.”

  Annabelle Winston took a step back, and Bobby Grant put out a hand to steady her. Even at that moment, I’d never seen a woman less in
need of steadying. Her eyes widened.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “It means I’m off the job. Finished. Kaput.” The word brought Velez Caputo to mind, and I shrugged it away. “You told me I was the only person on the case.”

  “You are,” Annabelle Winston said, her eyes fixed on mine.

  “Yeah? What’s he?” I asked, nodding toward Bobby Grant. “A skinless wiener?”

  Bobby Grant’s lower lip protruded even further. I wondered how much of it he was holding in reserve. Maybe he kept it curled up, like a butterfly’s tongue.

  “He’s not a detective,” she said, as though that answered everything.

  “He held a press conference,” I said. “He and you,” I amended. “You announced to the whole world that you’d retained me. You didn’t even have the courtesy to let me know. I wake up in the morning, and everybody except David Frost is calling me for an interview.”

  “David Frost is in England,” Bobby Grant said professionally. “If he weren’t, this is his kind of story.”

  “I don’t want to be part of anybody’s story. I’m a detective. I need a certain amount of anonymity in order to be able to do my job. Not to mention the fact that the guy who burned your father wrote me a letter and delivered it to my house.”

  “He did?” It was the first time I’d seen Annabelle Winston look genuinely surprised.

  “Himself,” I said. “When I took the job, I acknowledged that I was willing to go looking for him. I’m not willing to have him looking for me. I’m flammable.”

  “We made a mistake,” Annabelle Winston said contritely.

  “What are you talking about?” Bobby Grant said. “He’s writing letters now. That could be a breakthrough,” he added, sounding like Hammond Lite.

  “Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said. It was the vocal equivalent of a one-way ticket to Siberia. “Go away.”

  “But, but,” Bobby sputtered.

  “Just scram,” Annabelle Winston said. “Down the hall. Anywhere. This instant.” She snapped her fingers. Bobby gave her a betrayed look and faded about six feet behind her.

  “We made a mistake,” she said again. “All I was trying to do was light a fire under the cops.”

  “Miss Winston,” I said. “You succeeded. You also robbed me of whatever advantage I might have had in trying to find the Crisper.” She winced at the word. “What’s more, and what’s probably more serious, you pissed off the police. Before Bobby orchestrated his headlines, I had a chance at getting hold of whatever they have. Now I might as well be wearing a bell around my neck and a sign that says Unclean. They’re embarrassed. Cops are macho, you know. They don’t like to be embarrassed. It makes them feel impotent.”

  She lowered her head. “Forgive me,” she said.

  “I forgive you,” I said. “But I’m finished.”

  “We’re finished, Miss Winston,” echoed a male voice. “You can go back in now.” I hadn’t heard the door open.

  The owner of the voice was a young doctor wearing an ill-advised pencil-thin mustache. His face was the shade of gray that the relatives of patients don’t want to see. He’d been through something for which his training hadn’t prepared him.

  “Is he … ?” Annabelle Winston let the question hang in the air.

  “Sedated,” the doctor said, touching the mustache with an experimental thumbnail. “This is the part that hurts.” He looked at me. “Changing the dressing,” he explained. “We have to put him out.”

  “I thought it all hurt,” I said.

  “He’s got third-degree burns,” the doctor said. “That means total loss of skin. The nerves go with the skin. Where he hurts most are the boundaries between the third- and second-degree bums. Where he’s got some skin left.”

  Annabelle Winston started crying. This was nothing controlled, nothing like the averted face in the suite at the Bel Air. This was tears and snot and screwed-up eyelids and a sound like someone exhaling golf balls.

  “Now, now,” the young doctor said ineffectually, out of his depth again. The mustache made him look like a kid fancied-up for Halloween. He put a hand on her arm, but she shrugged it off and grabbed my wrist. Her fingers felt like bridge cables. “Come in here,” she said fiercely. “Get your ass in here.” She dragged me through the open door with a strength that almost dislocated my shoulder. Bobby Grant followed us, hovering like a bad conscience. The doctor, abashed at the reaction he’d provoked, came in and closed the door behind us.

  “Take a look,” Annabelle Winston said shakily. “The brotherhood of the pumpkin.”

  Abraham Winston—what had once been Abraham Winston—lay in a bed that looked like one of the roasting racks at the Escorial, the Spanish palace of Philip II where heretics had been barbecued for the enlightenment of the Saved. The bed was a metal frame hitched up to a complicated series of levers and pulleys. Winston was swathed from feet to nipples in white bandages, and the skin that was exposed was covered with a ghastly, greasy white ointment.

  His head was enormous. It was swollen and blistered, all the features concentrated into an area in its center. His hair was gone. His face looked like the crimped end of one of Hammond’s cigars, eyes, nose, and mouth pinched into the middle. The eyes, mercifully, were closed.

  “Um, pumpkin,” the young doctor said. “All serious burn victims look like this.” I was looking at what Annabelle had hoped I’d never see, the reason it took her an hour to recognize her father.

  “Why not a real bed?” I asked. I just needed to make sure that I could talk.

  “We have to be able to turn him,” the doctor said. He’d used the time to recover his equilibrium. “You can’t change his bandages, you can’t put the ointment on him, without turning him.”

  “Why is his head swollen?”

  “Blistering.” The doctor made a small motion that took in Annabelle, asking me not to force him to discuss it further. His tongue snaked out and touched the bottom of the ridiculous mustache.

  “The head’s only part of it,” Annabelle said mercilessly, recovering her power of speech. She drew a gray silk arm across her face. So much for that suit. “Tell him about his lungs.”

  The doctor looked down at his feet. One shoe went back and forth, grinding out the cigarette he probably wanted. I wanted one, too.

  “He inhaled fire,” the doctor said. “He got up before the old woman threw the blanket over him. Perfectly natural reflex, of course. Anybody who’d been set on fire would get up. Try to run away from the fire. Try to find water, maybe. I’d do it, too. Even though it’s the worst possible thing to do.” He exhaled a quart of pent-up air. “But there wasn’t any water around. So he breathed fire.”

  “So he can’t talk?” I asked.

  “Nothing anybody could understand,” said the doctor.

  Bobby Grant put an arm around Annabelle’s shoulders, and she shrugged it off like an unwanted fall of snow. Her eyes were on her father.

  “Isn’t there someplace else you can take him?” I asked. “And what old woman?”

  “The old woman who kept him from burning to death there and then, may her soul rot in hell,” Annabelle Winston said. She was finished with crying; she’d put it behind her as though it had been a social gaffe. “At least then it would have been over quickly. Instead of this. And, no, you can’t move him. Even if there were anywhere better, which there isn’t. We already moved him once, from County USC to here. They didn’t even want us to do that.”

  “Burn victims just get worse,” the doctor said apologetically. “Infection. Every burn is infected. The skin, the hair follicles, are teeming with bacteria. Move them and they die. Excuse me, Miss Winston.”

  “I’ve heard it before,” Annabelle Winston said. “Take a look at Santa Claus, Simeon. Take a good look, and then tell me you’re quitting.”

  Bobby Grant put in his two hundred dollars’ worth. “I don’t know how you could,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “you’re not me.” I turned to
go.

  There was a sound behind me, like the rasping of a file over iron, and I turned back. The human parody on the metal bed lifted a greasy, ointment-covered arm.

  “He should be out,” the doctor said worriedly. “A normal human being would be out cold.”

  “He’s not a normal human being,” Annabelle said, crossing to the bed. “He’s Abraham Winston.”

  “Schossshuaaa?” said the thing on the metal frame.

  “Yes, Daddy,” Annabelle Winston said. “I’m here. It’s Joshua.”

  “Surrammatagga,” said the thing on the metal frame, its open eyes locked on Annabelle’s. “Dhooo shomeshing.” With supernatural force, it lifted its shoulders and turned its head. “Dhooo shomeshing,” it repeated.

  “We’re going to do something,” Annabelle said in a businesslike tone. She turned and pointed a gray silk arm at me. “We’re going to get him. This is the man who’s going to do it.”

  The pumpkin head turned to me. Its red, tiny, swollen eyes bore in on mine and found me lacking. Then, with a clogged cough, Abraham Winston passed out.

  “Everybody,” the doctor said in a stricken voice. “Everybody out of the room. Now.” We all went. Even Bobby Grant had nothing to say.

  In the corridor, Annabelle Winston clutched my hand in hers. All the control was gone, washed away by tears and terror. “Say you’ll stay with it,” she pleaded. She’d gotten a case of hiccups. They made her sound twelve years old.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” Bobby Grant was smart enough to shut up and stay shut up.

  “You have to,” she said. “You’ve seen him.”

  “Maybe,” I said again. I shook the two of them loose and headed for the parking lot. Alice started with ironic ease, and I drove home, full of righteous determination to quit once and for all the next morning. When I got home, I opened a Singha beer and congratulated myself on a narrow escape. Resolving myself that I’d quit for good over the phone in the morning, I drank until dark. Then I went to bed and tried not to dream. I almost succeeded. I only had to get up twice for water.

  While I slept, Abraham Winston died, and the Crisper set fire to another bum. When I woke up and went down the driveway on my way to Eleanor, there was a new letter in my mailbox.