The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I've got some whiskey in my pocket,” Skippy said unexpectedly. “You want to step outside?”

  Back out in the parking lot, Skippy shivered in the breeze as he pulled out a silver hip flask that could have dated from the twenties. “Glenfiddich,” he said. “About a hundred years old and smoked over peat bogs or something.” He handed it to me first.

  I'm not a whiskey drinker, but the first sip converted me. It was warm and smoky and smoother than an Irish lie. I felt a red line of heat, like a thermometer in reverse, snake down from my throat to my belly button.

  “I knew there was a reason for grain,” I said, “other than roughage I mean.” I handed it back. The world looked a lot better. The cypresses, black against the spangling of stars, achieved the spiral harmony Van Gogh had painted. Skippy gulped twice and then burped.

  “This is a no-no,” he said, wiping his mouth and giving the flask back. “No drinking during the retreat.”

  “I thought there weren't any rules.”

  “Normally there aren't. But this thing, this retreat, is like a fat farm for the consciousness. Just like you're not supposed to slip away to Winchell's for a doughnut while you're losing weight, you're not supposed to cloud your consciousness while you're here.”

  I took a much longer swig this time. The flask held more than I'd thought. “Sounds reasonable,” I said, swallowing. “Are you sure this stuff is legal?”

  I was positive that Skippy's answer made sense, but it was hard to make it out around the neck of the flask, which was lodged between his lips. I hadn't eaten in hours, and I felt suddenly light-headed. “Damnaroonies,” I said. “Gimme that.”

  He did. This time I was the one who burped. I tried to hand the flask back, but Skippy was looking at his watch and I almost dropped it. “Any minute now, she should be coming in,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Angel. And Mary Claire. Don't you want to see them?”

  Since I still had the flask, I took another swipe at it. “Sure, I want to see them. Let's go.”

  “Just a minute.” Skippy turned the flask to a ninety-degree angle and drained it. “You know,” he said confidingly, “as a great statesman and drinker once said, there is some shit up with which I will not put. That's Winston Churchill, when some twit tried to edit his prose. Why shouldn't a sentence end with a preposition?”

  “Every sentence has to end somewhere,” I said. “Unless you're Marcel Proust.”

  “Prowst. I always pronounced it Prowst.”

  “Well, he's dead anyway. Are we going in, or what?”

  “In,” Skippy said, shoving the flask back into his pocket. “About the shit I won't put up with, though. I mean, why shouldn't I drink? In moderation, of course.”

  “That goes without saying.” I hiccupped. “Moderation is the important thing.” Skippy laughed. Together we wove our way back into the hall.

  It seemed brighter and noisier than when we'd left it. Also a lot more cheerful. The whiskey hummed a little Irish jig in my veins.

  “So what happens to them?”

  “Who?” Skippy said, squinting in the light. He was making a slightly erratic line for the pastries, with me trailing behind.

  “The ones who stop Speaking.”

  “They grow up, I guess. Well, one of them, anyway. The first speaker, Anna Klein, she and her mother got killed a few years back. Automobile crash. They were on their way to one of the Church's cable broadcasts—did you know the Church has its own cable show?”

  “No. How would I? I don't watch TV.”

  “Well, they were driving down from Yosemite, where they lived, she and her mother, I mean, and they blew a tire on the Grapevine. On the long downhill. Totaled. Terrible thing. You want a bear claw?”

  “I'll take the whole bear.” Skippy lurched around to hand me a pastry and succeeded in mashing it against my hand. “Oops,” he said.

  “Gee, you still remember your line. Were they alone in the car?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Let me get you another one.”

  “That's okay. My stomach doesn't know what it's supposed to look like. Whose fault was it?”

  Skippy's face was red enough to make Listener Dooley give him a hard look from across the table. Dooley's whiskey nose quivered like a divining rod.

  “Whose fault was what? The bear claw?”

  “No. The accident. The bear claw was John Barleycorn's fault.” I gave Listener Dooley a winning smile. “Great pastries,” I said. “My compliments to the chef.”

  Skippy said, “The accident was the tire's fault.”

  Dooley twitched audibly and Skippy followed my gaze. ‘“Evening, Listener,” he said genially. “What, no coffee?”

  Dooley's little raisin eyes were nuggets of suspicion. “Mr. Miller ” he began grimly, “alcohol is not . . .“I put a hand on Skippy's arm to steer him elsewhere.

  A celesta rang out. Everyone looked at the far end of the room.

  The bells were struck again and the crowd parted to admit Angel and Mary Claire. Both of them had changed clothes, the mother into a simple dark dress, and Angel into a sky-blue middy blouse with matching skirt. Her dazzling blond hair was pulled back into a pony tail now, and she looked like any other beautiful little girl. She held on to her mother's arm as though the presence of all the adults made her feel shy. She'd left the kitten backstage. There were four men with them, dressed alike in vaguely naval white jackets and dark trousers. A shimmer of coral behind them drew my eye, and I saw Dr. Merryman following along in their wake.

  “I guess her stomach's better,” Skippy said. “See, Simeon, she doesn't look like she's been through anything terrible.”

  “Who are the Gilbert-and-Sullivan sailors?”

  “Ushers. They're supposed to take care of Mary Claire and Angel. Just in case of crazies, you know?”

  People were pressing in on them now, squeezing past the Ushers to greet Angel and thank her for the Revealing. A couple of them shook her hand. Mary Claire's hand fell protectively onto her daughter's shoulder, but Angel ignored it. She exchanged polite words with the adults, and when a girl her own age came up to her, a friend, apparently, she whispered something and giggled.

  “I want to meet them,” I said.

  “Sure,” Skippy said, “no problem.” We started toward them.

  “What do I call her?”

  “What do you mean? You think she's the Queen Mother or something? When she's not Speaking she's just a little kid. Call her Angel.”

  We were about ten feet from them when something behind us fell with a loud crash. I turned quickly to see the heavyset woman who'd asked for Skippy's autograph, looking mortally embarrassed in front of an overturned table of books. She and two Listeners started to pick them up. When I looked back at Angel, she was surrounded by a white wall of Ushers, as alert as Secret Service men, standing shoulder to shoulder. Merryman had one hand on Mary Claire's shoulder and the other on Angel's. His face was set and hard.

  “Come on,” Skippy said. “The emergency's over.”

  Merryman caught sight of us as we approached and he relaxed into a pointy-toothed smile. “Ah, Skippy,” he said, “I see you found Simeon.”

  “How's Angel?” Skippy asked.

  “Fine. Too many french fries. She and her mother went into the McDonald's in Carmel this afternoon, and Angel, as they put it these days, pigged out. Have you enjoyed yourself, Simeon?”

  “It's been very instructive, Dick.” The electricity between us was so negative that if we'd been hanging from the ceiling on wires we'd have flown apart.

  “You'll want to say hello to Angel,” he said. “And Mary Claire, of course.”

  Mary Claire gave me a grave smile and a cool hand. Up close there was something coarse and worn about her. Her hair wasn't quite clean, and there was a slack looseness to her full lips. Angel was chatting animatedly with Skippy, asking him something about the young male lead on his show, but when Merryman touched her shoulder she looked up politely.

&
nbsp; “Angel Ellspeth, this is Simeon Grist. This was Simeon's first Revealing, Angel.”

  “Pleased to meetcha,” Angel said in a voice that was pure New York. “Didja like it?”

  I couldn't have been more surprised if she'd sung the bass aria from Aïda. If I'd had my back turned I would have thought it was a joke, Skippy imitating the Dead End Kids in falsetto.

  “Yes,” was the best I could manage at first. Then I said, “Did you like it?”

  “Sure,” she said, pronouncing it “shooah.” She looked puzzled at the question.

  “What does it feel like when you Speak?”

  “Great.” She gave me a broad smile. “It's like I got a really good friend, you know?”

  “Do you remember what you said?”

  “Never,” Merryman said. “It's ironic. Angel is the only person in the room who doesn't hear the Revealing.”

  We smiled at each other over how ironic it was.

  “I listen later, onna tape,” Angel said in the voice of a castrato Manhattan cabdriver. “I got a little Walkman, I play it on that.” She looked up at her mother. “I don't get a lot of it, though.”

  “We learn about the Church through Revealings, of course,” Merryman said, “but we learn about ourselves through Listening, and children don't begin Listening sessions until they're ten. Even though they're spoken through her, the Revealings are a little advanced for her.” He threw me the smile again. I didn't throw it back.

  “Hell,” Skippy said, looking apprehensively from Merryman to me and back again. “They're advanced for me.”

  Angel tugged at her mother's arm. Mary Claire leaned down, and Angel whispered something in her ear. Merryman watched them closely.

  Mary Claire raised a hand. People stopped talking at once. “Angel's tired now” she said. “I've got to put her to bed. Please stay and enjoy yourselves. Over on Table Ten, by the way, are tapes of the First Revealing, through poor little Anna. This is the first time they've been available in some time. Thank you all for coming.”

  The Ushers closed ranks around them, and Angel, Mary Claire, and Merryman went back the way they'd come. I found myself looking at the back of Angel's slender neck, bared by the upsweep of the pony tail. It was a neck made for the headsman's ax.

  “Hey, the time,” Skippy said. “Your plane is at when?”

  “Ten,” I said, watching them go. Angel had hold of her mother's hand.

  “You'd better roll. Unless you'd like to stay here, I mean. I've got an extra bed in my cottage. I've also got some more Glenfiddich. You could sit up and chat with Dr. Merryman, you seem to like him so much.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I've got an early morning, and it'll be better if the clock goes off in L.A.”

  He walked me out to the rented car. As I sat there fiddling with the controls and trying to remember how the damn thing started, he cleared his throat meaningfully and I looked up at him.

  “So,” he said. “Do you think I'm crazy?”

  “No.” I gave the steering wheel a half-twist and turned the key again. This time the engine caught. “I think I am.”

  My plane left two hours late. At two-twenty that morning I coasted Alice to a stop in front of Sally Oldfield's house and watched the rain spatter the windshield.

  There wasn't a lighted window on the block. I could have fired a load of grapeshot down the middle of the street and not hit anyone. Even the cats were inside waiting for the rain to let up. The clouds were low enough to reflect the lights of the city with a chill, chalky glow. It looked like the cats were going to have a long wait.

  I wasn't dressed for this. By the time I'd pushed open the little gate at the side of Sally's house, I was soaked to the skin and colder than the glimmer of hope at the gates of hell. The low-hanging leaves of a ficus brushed at my face as I tracked along the side of the house. They felt almost warm by comparison. I rounded the corner into the tiny backyard and found myself looking at a perfectly maintained little vegetable garden. I was so cold that my thought processes had slowed; it took me maybe ten seconds to realize why I could see it.

  There were lights on in the back of the house.

  I ducked beneath a window and let the rain pelt me. I had visions of running into the boys in blue. Then I remembered that they didn't have Sally's name, and I had visions of running into something worse.

  The time seemed ripe for a futile gesture, so I turned up the collar on my shirt and got exactly what I should have expected: an icy rivulet of water down my back. In the conventions of Japanese samurai literature, such moments usually bring the hero instantaneous enlightenment. What this one brought me was an overpowering desire to sneeze.

  But I didn't. And then I didn't again. In all, I didn't sneeze about once every thirty seconds during the fifteen minutes or so I huddled there waiting for any kind of movement within the house. When the fifteen minutes were up I raised myself an inch at a time and looked in through the window. Another futile gesture. The blinds were drawn.

  Well, either someone was in there or they weren't, and I couldn't squat in the lettuce any longer without running the risk of hypothermia. I went to the back door and opened it, failing to be surprised by the fact that it was unlocked, and shouted cheerily, “Hi, honey, I'm home.” I felt like Ricky Ricardo. Lucy, Fred and Ethel, Little Ricky, or any combination thereof would have looked very good to me.

  They weren't there, or if they were, they didn't answer. I was in a laundry room. The dryer was open and clothes were spilled out of it, a cascade of white onto the red clay tile floor. Sally Oldfield had looked like the kind of woman who sorted her whites. She hadn't looked like the kind of woman who emptied her dryer onto the floor.

  Most laundry rooms open onto kitchens; it's cheaper for the contractors to keep all the plumbing in one place. Sally's house was no exception. I eased open the door at the end of the laundry room and stood there staring at chaos.

  The drawers had all been pulled out and dumped upside down into the center of the room. Cooking implements were scattered everywhere. The top of the stove had been pulled off to reveal the gas pipes beneath. Pilot lights glowed a pale blue. The test of a great housekeeper is the area beneath the cooktop. Sally's was immaculate. I felt obscurely proud of her.

  Whoever had taken the place apart had been uncommonly thorough. In the tiny dining room the table was upside down, as were the chairs, just in case something had been taped to their undersides. The sofa in the cozy little living room had been dismantled and the cushions and backs had been slit open. The oval hooked rug, probably a family hand-me-down, had been yanked to one side and turned over.

  On the floor in a corner, near an uprooted potted palm, some rectangles caught my attention. I picked them up, shook the potting soil off them, and turned them over.

  Pictures. Sally and a man who might have been Mr. Oldfield smiled into the camera, standing in front of someplace tropical, Hawaii maybe. Sally looked young and brave and full of conviction: this marriage was going to last forever. Their clothes, post-hippie loose and colorful, dated the pictures in the seventies.

  The photographs had been torn from their frames. In two of them, a knife had made a savage X through Sally's face. The man who held the knife must have known he had all the time in the world, pausing for a meaningless act of spite. I felt murderous.

  It was the same story everywhere. She had slept in a single bed, in a room that had once been almost Japanese in its austerity. The bed had been ravaged with the knife, one long jagged slash running from the head of the narrow mattress to the foot. Near an upended vanity table I picked up a hairbrush. It had a few of her hairs in it.

  I sat on the box spring and pictured her getting up in the morning. She would have put on the pale blue robe that lay crumpled against the wall and gone into the bathroom for her shower. Then, probably even before she drank her coffee, she would have sat in the early sunlight streaming through the east-facing bedroom windows and brushed her hair. She'd had beautiful hair. She'd taken care of h
er hair, not out of vanity but out of self-respect.

  “What was your secret, Sally?” I said out loud. “Why did they do it?” This wasn't random, it wasn't a sex slaying that began and ended in some shithouse motel on Sunset. Sally Oldfield, as sweet as she had seemed to be, had gotten mixed up with pros.

  In all, I sat there for an hour. Then I left, closing the front door on the odds and ends of Sally Oldfield's life and on her secret too.

  Chapter 8

  Her name was Rhoda Gerwitz, and she'd just canceled her wedding.

  “I mean, honest to God, the creep, he's got the emotional depth of a cold sore. All chin and no forehead,” she said around a mouthful of hamburger. She'd briefly considered the chefs salad and then rejected it; after all, she could stop worrying about fitting into her wedding dress.

  “Can you imagine?” She extricated a limp piece of onion from her mouth, looked at it critically, and put it on the edge of her plate. “Here's my best friend, my number-one bridesmaid, vanished from the face of the earth. I was going to heave the bouquet straight at her, and she's fallen over the edge somewhere. Well, how could I don the lace and orange blossoms and waltz down the aisle under such a cloud? Pass the catsup?”

  I handed it to her and she upended it over her french fries. It made a gurgling sound. “If you're a girl,” she continued, monitoring the catsup's flow, “men being what they are, odds are pretty good you're going to marry a jerk. No offense, I hope, present company excepted, and you seem like a nice-enough guy. But there's jerks and then there's jerks. If you're going to put up a sign that says no jerks, you're going to be an old maid.” She giggled. “I always loved that expression,” she said. ” ‘Old maid.’ Like there's no way to have fun except getting married. If mama only knew. Still, like I said, there's jerks and jerks. A girl's gotta have standards.”

  “And his J.Q. was too high.”

  She stopped chewing and gave me a level gaze. “J.Q.?”

  “Jerk Quotient.”

  She sputtered and grabbed a napkin. “Don't do that,” she said. “Not when my mouth is full. Sally always says that the only problem with eating lunch with me is that she needs a raincoat.” She stopped talking, looked at the burger, and put it down. “Aah, shit,” she said, “Sally.” She dabbed at a corner of her mouth with her napkin. It was the wrong corner. “How long have you known her for?”