The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  “The dyke who served you this stuff.” Hammond was a vehement homophobe. If he weren't, he wouldn't have been in Records. The alleged perp whose rights he'd neglected to recite before breaking his nose had been of the gay persuasion.

  “How's Um Hinckley?” I said as he sat in Eleanor's chair.

  “About as useful as a flat tire,” he said, finishing the drink with a grimace. “Where are the men these days?”

  “There's always Peppi,” I said, waving for her attention. She looked past me, then saw Hammond and started toward us, jostling the cop who was dancing with Eleanor with unnecessary force.

  “They're not joining the police,” he said, pronouncing it, as all cops do, “pleece,” “and that's for sure. ‘The boys in blue’ has taken on a new meaning.”

  “Al,” Peppi said, looking down at the empty glass in front of him. “You didn't drink that, did you?”

  “Peppi,” Hammond said, “you should join the force. We need your kind of random malice.”

  “I can do more harm here.”

  “Well, don't do it to us. Give us a couple good ones, wouldya? Something that won't threaten my friend's private eyesight.” He chuckled, emitting a sound that suggested gravel in a cement mixer. That was Hammond's idea of light banter.

  “Two?” Peppi said. “Or three?”

  “Three,” I said. “Let her get home alone.”

  “Who's three?” Hammond said.

  “Little Miss Chopsticks,” Peppi said unpleasantly, “out there on the dance floor.”

  Hammond followed her gaze. “Cute,” he said. “Why are you letting her dance with Monohan?”

  “It's not a question of letting,” I said.

  “Lib,” Hammond said. “I liked it better when it was short for libido. What're you, waiting for the bourbon to age?” he asked Peppi, who was looking moonstruck at Eleanor.

  “Every minute counts,” she said sulkily, heading for the bar.

  “You want to watch her,” Hammond said. “You want to watch Monohan too. He's old and fat and his eyes are on top of each other, but they go for him.”

  Monohan was younger and thinner than Hammond, but I let it pass. “So,” Hammond said conversationally, “you're withholding information on a murder.”

  “This is withholding? Why are we here?”

  “Why'd you stand me up the first time?”

  “Oh, Al,” I said, putting my hand on his. “I didn't know you cared.”

  He yanked his hand away and looked around to see if anyone were watching. “Some things I care about. Murder, for example. You may be a friend, Simeon, but you're still a civilian. Murder is a cop's landscape.”

  “Oh, good, the police are here,” Eleanor said behind me. “Not another word, now, not until I come back. Where's the ladies' room, Monnie?”

  “I don't think there is one,” Hammond said. “Lady cops do it standing up.”

  “I'll show you,” Monohan said gallantly.

  “Monnie?” I said. “As in mononucleosis?”

  Monohan's red face got a little redder and he opened his mouth. Then he looked at Hammond and shut it again.

  “If there is a ladies' room, Monohan can show you to it,” Hammond said with exaggerated politeness. “He uses it all the time. Don't you, Monnie?”

  “How's Records, Hammond?” Monohan asked with a practiced sneer.

  “If we had a ladies' room,” Hammond said, “it'd be perfect for you.”

  “Come on, Eleanor,” Monohan said in a dignified tone. “The conversation will be better in the ladies'. Even if you're by yourself.” He took her elbow and guided her away.

  “God, I'm glad to know cops are as rude to each other as they are to everyone else,” I said.

  Hammond ignored me, watching them. “Ah, the mystery of the East,” he said.

  “Careful, Al. This is not just a squeeze.”

  “That's obvious. If your blood pressure were any higher you'd explode. Calm down, you look like a cop. What's her name?”

  “Eleanor.” She and Monohan disappeared down a corridor together.

  “I already heard that, you twit. Monnie used it, remember? The girl who was killed. What was her name?”

  “Sally, by which I mean Sarah, Oldfield. Is he going to go into the bathroom with her?”

  “Not unless she lets him.” Peppi showed up with three doubles. Hammond gave her a minimal smile in return. “Three more in five minutes,” he said. “My friend's paying.”

  “I never would have guessed,” she said.

  “Put a sock in it,” Hammond said. “And get us another chair.”

  “Get it yourself,” Peppi said. “What do you think I am, a furniture mover?”

  “There's a future in it. Nobody stays put these days.”

  “You couldn't prove it by me. Some people have already outstayed their welcome.”

  “Peppi,” Hammond said, “this display of pique is not becoming.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “It's becoming boring.”

  “Tell it to someone who cares,” Peppi said. “This ain't TV. If you can't change channels, try changing bars.”

  “Three more,” Hammond said. “Five minutes. Now, beat it.”

  Peppi beat it.

  “Sugar and spice,” I said.

  “She's okay,” Hammond said, displaying all his sensitivity in one fell swoop. “It's not easy to be a dyke these days.”

  “It probably never was.”

  “Tell me about Sarah Oldfield.”

  “Tell us both about Sarah Oldfield,” Eleanor said, seating herself on a chair that she'd pulled up herself and picking up her glass.

  “That was quick,” I said.

  “It was awful,” she said. “Too awful to use. Completely outside my frame of reference. Monnie's sweet, though.”

  “Well, I'm really glad to hear that,” I said.

  “I'm Al Hammond,” Hammond said, putting out a paw. “And you're Eleanor. Simeon's told me so much about you,” he added untruthfully.

  She shook his hand and blushed. “He has?” She glanced at me.

  “You're Topic A.”

  “Topic or toxic?”

  Hammond laughed, a trifle uncertainly, and took refuge in business. “Sarah Oldfield,” he said.

  “This is not a gift,” I said. “It's a trade.”

  “What do you want? And what are you giving?”

  “To take it in reverse order, I'm giving you a name, an address, and some background. What you're giving me is in. I want in on everything you find out, and I want to know everything you can put together about three people. Make that four people.”

  “Have you got a client?”

  “No. I've got a grudge. I don't think Sally Oldfield should be dead.”

  Hammond pulled out a tiny notebook, dwarfed in his hamlike hands. He felt around in his jacket pockets for a pen. “What's the background?”

  “Have we got a deal?”

  “How am I supposed to treat this information?”

  “That's your problem. Pretend I'm an informant, someone on the street.”

  Hammond drank. Eleanor and I followed suit. “Is the information good?” he said.

  “Better than anything you've got now.”

  He waved a hand for Peppi. “Deal,” he said. “Shoot.”

  I told him about how I'd been hired, about the line of bull that had been fed to me about Sally. I described Needle-nose, and he nodded. As I'd figured, he already had a description from the people who ran the motel. I shut up as Peppi served a new round, and then told him about the Church. He sat up and took notice. Hammond's pen was scratching away, but Eleanor hadn't yet taken a note. I told him about Rhoda Gerwitz and about Skippy Miller.

  ‘They got your name from Skippy,” Eleanor said.

  “He said not.”

  “Simeon. He told his Listener.”

  I sat back and felt stupid. “You're good at this,” Hammond said to her.

  “I've been working at it all day,” she said, look
ing pleased. “He's a good teacher. Simeon, what about the other murder?”

  Hammond leaned forward. All the good feeling fled from his face. “What other murder?”

  “I need to know we have a deal.”

  “My ass,” he said.

  “Good night.” I got up to go.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I told you. I want in, and I want information on four people. Dr. Richard Merryman of the Church of the Eternal Moment, two folks from something that calls itself the Congregation of the Present, and one other.”

  “Names?”

  “From the Congregation, Dr. Hubert Wilburforce and Sister Zachary.” He wrote. “Number four is a man named Ellis Fauntleroy, or possibly not, deceased. I want everything you've got on any of them. Nothing held back, Al.”

  “Do I look like a man who'd hold something back?” Neither of us said anything, so he crossed himself. “You've got it,” he said. “On my mother's grave.”

  “Your mother's alive,” Eleanor said.

  “How do you know?” Hammond said, looking surprised.

  “You're not married,” Eleanor said, “and you see your mother often. It's written all over your face.”

  “Well, I'll be damned,” Hammond said.

  “Where, specifically?” I asked, looking at Hammond's face.

  “His forehead,” Eleanor said.

  “My mother notwithstanding,” Hammond said, “you've got a deal. What's the other murder?”

  “Friday night in Santa Monica,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “The guy I mentioned, Harker or Fauntleroy.” Hammond still looked blank. “In Santa Monica,” I said again.

  Hammond said nothing.

  “In the TraveLodge, for Christ's sake. How many murders were there in the Santa Monica TraveLodge on Friday night?”

  Hammond laid down his notebook and spread two empty hands. “None,” he said.

  Chapter 14

  That was what I got for not reading the papers. I'd been assuming all along that Harker's death had been reported, when obviously a clean-up squad had been waiting in the wings. For whatever reason, they'd waited until I'd cleared out and then sent in the housekeepers. And for whatever reason, I told myself again, they'd left me alive.

  So, we were dealing with a number of people. At least three, I figured: one to kill Harker, probably one more to help him, as Hamlet said, to lug the guts into the neighbor room—bodies are heavy—and one to go to my house and slip the cassette out of my answering machine. One or more of them had obviously been listening in when Harker called me, and Harker had probably known it but it hadn't worried him. He'd thought he was part of the gang.

  On the whole, that made me happy. The more people you have involved in a murder, the more likely it is that one of them will do something stupid.

  Hollering over the music in the Red Dog, Hammond had made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, I was the stupid one. If I'd done what I was supposed to do, which is to say call the cops, they'd have a body. He'd used language that had turned Eleanor scarlet, and I'd had no choice but to listen. As we staggered out of the Red Dog and into the rain on Hollywood Boulevard, I'd asked whether our deal still stood.

  Hammond didn't seem to notice the rain. He stood there, solid and bulky, with water streaming down his face, and thought for a long wet moment.

  “With a difference,” he finally said. “The information is two-way. I get everything you get.” He really wanted out of Records.

  “Al,” I said, “of course. I'd assumed that all along.”

  “Honey,” Hammond said to Eleanor, who was shivering at my side, “go home with Peppi. She's a straighter guy than your buddy here.”

  “He's always been a liar,” she said. So much for loyalty.

  “All of it, Simeon,” Hammond said to me. “And I mean it. Investigators' licenses are precarious things.”

  I got my legs to wobbling. “Look,” I said, “you're making me weak in the knees.”

  Hammond took Eleanor's hand in both of his. “You're a beautiful little thing,” he said, “and it's been a pleasure to meet you. Good-bye, jerk,” he said to me. He turned abruptly and walked away into the rain. He hardly weaved at all.

  “What a sweet man,” Eleanor said. “His mother is a very lucky woman.”

  “Well, you beautiful little thing,” I said, “where to now?”

  “Home. We've got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  We hadn't even hit the Santa Monica freeway when the man on the radio said that there'd been a mudslide in Topanga, closing the boulevard from the Pacific Coast Highway to Old Canyon.

  “Well, shit,” I said. “That's an extra fifty miles.”

  “Stay at my place,” she said absently.

  “You're kidding,” I said. Hope springs eternal.

  “Why not? The couch is comfortable.”

  Hope, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, is a thing with feathers, and Eleanor had just twisted its neck. For lack of anything more interesting to do, I turned the windshield wipers onto high, and they responded by swinging back and forth at exactly the same rate as before. The silence in the car lengthened in an ominous fashion. I turned right from La Brea onto the long freeway on-ramp, heading west.

  “Anyway,” she finally said, “if you sleep on my couch you won't be sleeping with that Roxy or whatever her name is.” She rapped her fingernails sharply against the window.

  I swallowed a couple of times and wondered how she knew about Roxanne Then I stopped wondering. The Women's Network, the world's most successful subversive society, had done its stuff. “Who am I supposed to sleep with?” I said, more defensively than I would have liked. “My teddy bear wore out years ago.”

  “Simeon,” she said with elaborate unconcern, “I don't care who you sleep with, as long as you don't catch anything. I mean, I certainly hope you don't think I'm being possessive.”

  Childishly I sped up; Eleanor hated it when I drove fast. This time, though, she seemed determined to ignore it. She chewed distractedly on the ends of her hair and gazed out the window on her side.

  “I want to interview the Speaker and her mother,” she finally said, “and that Dr. Merryman you keep talking about.”

  “Great,” I said. “And Happy Trails to you.”

  “Are you going to come along?”

  “They know me.”

  “So what? They don't know you're a detective, do they?”

  “No, but they know my name isn't Algernon Swinburne.”

  “Good thing. I was getting tired of that name anyway. I couldn't keep calling you Algy. It sounds like something that grows in a pool.”

  “This is dangerous, Eleanor,” I said for perhaps the twelfth time. “These folks kill people.”

  “Why is it okay for you and not for me?” she asked with a sudden burst of energy. “Is murder something new, some passing fad? Do you think I like it when you swashbuckle around all night, like some Boy Scout fantasy, and come home with holes in your head? This is the first time since you started this stupid job that I've gotten a chance to see what it's all about. So it's dangerous. So is driving like a maniac when it's raining. Simeon, would you please slow down?”

  “Then you're in this for keeps,” I said.

  “Oh, come on. Stop playing Lochinvar. I don't want to get rescued. There's a story here. It could make a big difference in my life. The New Age is getting old. Are you going to slow down or not?”

  I eased my foot from the accelerator. “One of the Speakers is dead,” I said. “Let's try to locate the one who isn't. She couldn't be more than seventeen by now.”

  “What's her name?”

  I didn't know, and it made me feel dumb. “Get it from Chantra,” I said. “If she doesn't have it, we'll go downtown to that hotel the Church owns and pick up some literature. And where is Mr. Ellspeth? The current Speaker must have a father, but the Church only books mother-daughter acts.”

  “Why is he important?”

 
“I don't know that he is. But maybe he's on the outside wishing he were in. If so, he could be resentful enough to talk to us.”

  “Like Wilburforce,” she said.

  “Like Wilburforce. Go into the morgue at the Times, if you can do it without having to explain what you're doing to too many people. Can you?”

  “I don't know. I've never looked in the morgue before. I've only worked for them a little while. Morgue,” she said. “What an awful word. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “Anything you can find on the Church. Or on the Congregation. Look for stories on the death of a girl named Anna Klein.”

  “Why and when?”

  “She was the Church's first Speaker. I don't know when, but it had to be within the last seven or eight years. The Church is only twelve years old.”

  “The one who died, right? Some kind of accident?”

  “Maybe,” I said. The wipers made another slow pass. “And then again, maybe not.”

  “Another one?”

  “Could be.”

  “Holy smoke,” Eleanor said. “She was just a little girl. Who'd want to kill a little girl? I know this sounds gruesome, Simeon, but there could be a mini-series here.”

  “Sooner or later,” I said, “there could also be a man with a gun in his hand. As your friend Peppi said, this isn't television.”

  “Why do you assume it's a man?”

  “Good point,” I said grudgingly. “The Church is riddled with women.”

  “That's a pleasant way to put it. But you're probably right. The bigwigs all seem to be men.”

  “It was ever thus.”

  A big-rig, a twelve-wheeler at least, howled past us on the left, throwing off sheets of water from its tires. The light in the cab was on, and I watched in fascination as the driver tossed back a couple of pills.

  “Anything else?” she said.

  “Yeah. Hold off on Merryman and Angel for the moment, if you don't mind. Let's talk to the people who don't know me first, okay? A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it's also the place where you're most likely to walk into an ambush.”

  “You're so masculine,” she said. It didn't sound like a compliment.

  “Then why do I have to sleep on the couch?”