The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  Chapter 16

  Mrs. Yount's pendulous lower lip trembled. So did the paper cup in her hand. The cup, courtesy of McDonald's, said fresh coffee but the aroma was pure Jack Daniel's.

  “I can't believe she's gone,” Mrs. Yount said. “I always knew she'd come home. And now she won't.”

  Mrs. Yount's living room was in its usual state of chaos. Clothes were piled about eight inches thick on the carpet, if there was a carpet. An old, worn fur coat was spread out in front of the TV, which was tuned to a daytime show about the turbulent emotional lives of doctors and nurses. Two yolk-spattered plates, the refuse of Mrs. Yount's significant breakfast, littered the coat's shedding collar. Outside, a waist-high wall of empty whiskey bottles dripped water around Mrs. Yount's pathetic little garden. Mrs. Yount didn't like to throw her dead soldiers away. The trashmen might talk. Instead, she stacked them neatly inside the cinder-block wall that surrounded her scraggly patio.

  “I should of felt something,” she said. “Wouldn't you think I'd of felt something if she was dead?”

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “There couldn't have been any pain, the man said. She ran right under the truck, and it was over.”

  The lip trembled again. I was terrified that she'd begin to cry. “I guess that's something,” she said. “He was a nice man?”

  “Very nice. He felt terrible.”

  “What kind of truck?”

  I wasn't ready for the question. “A beer truck. Making a delivery to the grocery.”

  “Fluffy liked beer. I gave her a little saucerful just before bed. She drank Anchor Steam.”

  “She had good taste,” I said idiotically. “I drink it myself sometimes.”

  “Would you like one?”

  “No,” I said. “That's all right.”

  Mrs. Yount raised her paper cup to her lips and started to swallow, but then she made a sputtering noise and drops of whiskey spattered the crumpled clothes at her feet. A fat tear squeezed itself loose from her eye. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, dear . . . oh, dear.”

  “Please, Mrs. Yount,” I said.

  “What am I to do?” She looked at the television screen and the tears flowed down. “She was only three. What am I to do?”

  “You'll be fine.” I reached out and patted her arm.

  She looked down at my hand and then heavily up at me, and there was a little click behind her eyes and the old Mrs. Yount was back. “A lot you know, mister,” she said. “Go away. Send me a bill.” She waved me away and picked up an empty Jack Daniel's bottle. Without turning back, she tottered toward the back door to add it to the wall of empties. “Just send me a bill, mister, that's all.” The glass door to the patio slid open with a squeal that started a dog howling somewhere.

  I left without saying anything about the leak in the roof.

  In the high and palmy days of Hollywood glamour the place had called itself the Borzoi, and it had offered temporary and very expensive shelter to various Huntingtons, Hartfords, Sepulvedas, and Doheneys, not to mention a clutch of Barrymores. The Californians came there when the fires of autumn razed the elegant homes on the hillsides and when their wives were suing them for divorce, and the Barrymores when they were desperate enough for money to desert the adoring audiences of New York and hop the Twentieth Century for the three-day trip to Los Angeles. All day they'd labor in silence in the converted barns on Gower and Sunset, letting their famous voices go to waste and loathing themselves for pandering to a vulgar new medium, and at night they'd return to the Borzoi in their long white limousines to enjoy the fruits of their labors. They seldom took much money back to New York.

  What remained of the Borzoi's elegance was mostly in the refined bones of the building, a sharp-elbowed piece of Art Deco that laughed at gravity, and in the long-dark neon portrait of two impossibly slim dogs that raced each other over the spiky chrome doors leading into the lobby. There were six pairs of doors in all, needing nothing more than a little chrome polish and a few hours of work to be restored to glory, but they hadn't been touched in years.

  In fact, from where I stood, across the street, I couldn't see that the Borzoi's current owners, the Church of the Eternal Moment, had done much for the neighborhood. The sign that for sixty years had said the borzoi in angular letters had been replaced by a large, clunky hand-painted affair announcing the new landlord's presence, but that was about it. I'd arranged to meet Eleanor at one at the Times, and since that meant going downtown it seemed like an opportunity to take a look at Church headquarters. I don't go downtown much, and every time I go I remember why.

  The Borzoi faced west across a sodden square that had probably once been a pleasant little park. Dozens of homeless men and women had moved or been herded into the square, using plastic trashbags and cardboard cartons to shield themselves from the rain. It was about as effective as it sounds. The sanitary facilities were as low-tech as the housing, and the square smelled like an open sewer, which, in effect, it was.

  The extent of the Church's charity toward the dispossessed on its doorstep was evident from across the street. Ragged men and women sat, glazed and absent, in the doorways on either side of the Borzoi, and lurched up and down the sidewalk to the right and to the left. But no one huddled for refuge in the Borzoi's doorways, and no one strolled bedazedly in front of it. A waterlogged red carpet ran from the six pairs of chrome doors to the very edge of the curb. The carpet was flanked by thick black dripping wire ropes that traveled down the steps on heavy metal stanchions and terminated exactly eighteen inches from the gutter. There was enough room for someone with minimal motor control to squeeze by on his way to or from the brown-bag store at the corner, but there was obviously no invitation to sit on the Borzoi's steps and rest a spell.

  This message was further underlined by the presence of two beefy jokers wearing the nautical outfits I'd seen up in Carmel. They stood just inside the right- and left-hand doors and glared vigilantly out toward the street. They were obviously ready to protect that wet red carpet with their lives, if the need arose. The one on the right had the kind of face that suggested that he hoped the need would arise, and sooner rather than later: fat, downturned lips, a short thick pug nose, and two stupid little eyes lurking close together under a bony brow-ridge that I thought had been eliminated from the gene pool several million years ago. The other one just looked dumb.

  As I crossed the street and set foot on the squishy red carpet, I decided on the dumb one. I didn't know whether I'd get a big smile, a salute, or a demand for a password, but whatever it was, I preferred not to get it from someone who was clearly upset that fate hadn't made him a Shi'ite Muslim with a lot of opportunities to die for something he believed in.

  What I got from the dumb one was a burp, redolent of burger and onion, and a halfhearted attempt to open the left-hand door for me. I beat him to it without dislocating my shoulder, pushed it open myself, and went inside.

  The sad old lobby arched dark and dirty above me. Spots of damp dotted the carpet and tainted the air. A few people came and went, looking businesslike. Above the long reception counter at the far end of the room hung a whopping color photo of Angel and Mary Claire Ellspeth. A pin spot dangling from the ceiling picked it out and made it dazzle. It was the only bright thing in the room.

  When in doubt, as my mother always says, look like you know what you're doing. I nodded briskly to the two women at the counter and went to the elevator. The doors squealed open with a shrill plea for oil, and I pushed close door and stood there for a moment, thinking.

  There were six floors above me and one below. A sign on the elevator wall obligingly informed me that the second floor was the Listening Centre, quaint British spelling and all, and that the third and fourth were Church Offices. Five and six were labeled Residence Halls.

  There was no label for the floor, presumably a basement, below me. There was no way to get there, either. One could go up simply by pushing a button. To go down, one needed a key.

  That narrowed my option
s. They were further narrowed by the fact that I had no plausible business in the Church Offices and no interest in the Residence Halls. I pushed two and made a clanky ascent.

  The doors opened on a narrow hallway illuminated by bare bulbs plunked into what once must have been elaborate sconces. A young man seated behind a desk that faced the elevator looked up at me incuriously. The sign in front of him said listening centre. The young man was pudgy and unhealthily white, with a dirty-looking fall of straight brown hair sloping across his forehead in a way that made him look like a latter-day member of the Hitler Youth.

  “Room twelve,” I said, hoping that there was one and that the number was high enough to place it around the corner and out of sight.

  He pushed a register at me, tossed back the little fringe of hair on his forehead with a fat index finger, and held out a pen. “Down and to the left,” he said. “Name and time, please.”

  ALGY SWINBURNE, I Wrote. ELEVEN-FORTY.

  He swiveled the register around again and crossed out the time. “Eleven-forty-four,” he said with severe satisfaction, writing it above the scratch marks. “Your watch is slow.”

  “My gosh,” I said, setting it ostentatiously, “it certainly is. Is Listener Simpson around?”

  “She'd be in the studio now, wouldn't she?” He'd probably been a smartass since he was four.

  “The studio?”

  “The television studio,” he explained with a hint of weariness. “She's working the noon broadcast.”

  “Of course, she is,” I said. “Boy, there are days when I don't know my own name.”

  He looked down at the register. “How could you forget a name like Algy?”

  “I can try,” I said. “And thanks.”

  “For what?” he said, genuinely puzzled.

  “Just an expression.” I trundled off down the hall.

  Most of the room doors were firmly closed. No ghosts of Doheneys or Barrymores, swathed in floor-length ermine trench coats, paced the hallway. For that matter, no one paced the hallway. The Listening Centre was obviously not the place where church members went to pace. I made it all the way to room eight without having to look businesslike.

  The door to room eight was open.

  I glanced back at the winning youth behind the desk. He had his back to me, probably gazing balefully through his forelock and trying to guess what kind of idiot the elevator would next deliver into his day. I went into room eight.

  All remnants of the Borzoi's past glory had been resolutely swept away. The inevitable picture of Angel and Mary Claire hung in glorious color on one wall, but the furniture seemed to have been chosen for its drabness: a folding metal chair in front of a Formica card table, facing another folding metal chair. A sleek contraption that looked vaguely like an aluminum carton of cigarettes sat precisely in the middle of the table. It was bolted down. From the side of it facing the chair near the wall protruded a tangle of wires that terminated in a pair of thick cuffs. The cuffs sported electrodes, round and black, about the size of eye patches. The side of the contraption facing away from the cuffs and the electrodes featured an on-off switch, something that suggested a volume control, and a couple of dials. It could have been one thing and one thing only: a lie detector. Crude, but probably effective.

  A door at the end of the room led to a bathroom. The entire place smelled of cigarettes and sweat. The cigarettes were just cigarettes; the sweat was probably fear. For that matter, the cigarettes were probably fear too. The little machine didn't look very forgiving, and it wasn't hard to imagine the anxiety of being hooked up to it and asked questions about the most intimate aspects of your life. I'd once been scared half to death by a psychiatrist, and at least I could lie to her.

  I sat on the metal chair nearest the wall, where I figured the person who was being Listened to would sit. I picked up the cuffs: Velcro snaps clasped them together. I put one idly around my left wrist and sat there thinking about Sally Oldfield sitting in a room like this one, pouring her heart out to someone she'd never met, someone who nodded and smiled encouragingly and watched the dials. Sally Oldfield, fresh out of Utica, New York, and lost in the city, looking for the key to her life in the eyes of a stranger. Telling that stranger something very dangerous.

  Peeling off the cuff, I looked at my recently reset watch. Twelve noon. I didn't think I wanted to see much more of the Listening Centre. Unless I was very wrong, it was just more of the same.

  As I got up, my attention was caught by a sudden pop and whine from the television set sitting on a little table behind the Listener's seat, right where the—the what? the Talker? the Listenee?—would have been forced to look at it. Cartoons? The soaps? News of the World? Alistair Cooke? None of them sounded very likely. And none of them, so far as I knew, had the power to turn on sets automatically, although I was sure that somewhere some producer was working on it. I sat back down as the screen came to life.

  I was watching something called “Celebrity Corner,” if the large sparkly sign hanging on the back wall of the set was to be believed. On chairs that looked much more comfortable than anything to be found in room eight, three familiar-looking people sat smiling into the camera. One of them was Skippy Miller, one was an actress whose name I couldn't remember, and the third was an anemic-looking young man with shoulder-length hair. The other two chairs were occupied by Angel and Mary Claire Ellspeth.

  “. . . sharing gains,” Mary Claire was saying. “Not all of them, of course,” she added with a smile. “We've only got an hour.”

  The three celebrities beamed. Angel looked slightly fuddled, as if she wondered why she wasn't in school. “Clive,” Mary Claire said to the anemic-looking young man, “why don't we begin with you?”

  “Wul,” he said delightedly in an accent that was pure Midlands English, “why don't we, then?”

  “Now, you're an extremely successful young man,” Mary Claire said. Clive gestured in a self-deprecatory fashion. “Gold records, fans all over the world, a promising movie career.” She consulted a small card in her hand. “Homes in Los Angeles, London, and the Bahamas. What kind of gains could the Church deliver to someone like you?”

  “Meself,” Clive said promptly. “And that's the important thing, in't it?”

  Depends, I thought.

  “Of course it is,” Mary Claire said coaxingly. Clive nodded. Mary Claire smiled. Clive smiled back. “Um,” Mary Claire said. She wasn't very good at this. “You told me, just before we went on the air, a very interesting story about how you found the Church. Would you share it with our viewers?”

  “I was in the limo after a show,” Clive said with uncommon nasal resonance. His adenoids must have been bigger than Univac. “You know, everybody thinks that rock stars must feel great after a show, but for me that was always the lowest time. It was like my whole life was over, like I didn't have any more reason for being alive. The better the show was, the lower I felt. You know what I mean?”

  “Of course,” Mary Claire said, rapt. There was really something very unattractive in the looseness of her mouth. “With a triumph in the past, what can the present hold?”

  “Yeah,” Clive said. “That's it. I was low. So I told the driver to turn on the radio.”

  “This was in New York,” Mary Claire said, “so that meant you were listening to our affiliate there, WHOP-FM. Good gain, WHOP.” She pronounced it “W-HOPE” rather than “WHOP” She clasped her hands over her head in praise of WHOP.

  “I guess so,” Clive said a bit impatiently. He was a lot more interested in himself than he was in the good folks at WHOP. “And I heard this little angel's voice.”

  “Our little Angel,” Mary Claire said. She stroked her daughter's hair, and Angel pulled away slightly. Her eyes wandered away beyond the cameras. I found myself wondering again about the two little girls who had Spoken before her. Had they gotten bored? Had they suddenly become problems?

  Then I heard voices in the hall, a man and a woman.

  I stood up and waited. Th
e voices became louder, and I opted for discretion and went quickly into the bathroom. Leaving the door open, I stepped into the bathtub and drew the shower curtain.

  The man and the woman came into the other room.

  “. . . should be closed,” the man said.

  “He probably went over to the studio to watch the broadcast,” the woman said. “You know how the new ones are.”

  “That doesn't make it right. Put him down for discipline. Doors are supposed to be closed when the rooms aren't in use.”

  “He just wanted to see Angel in person.”

  “Well, it'll be a while before he sees her again,” the man said. “Basement him.”

  The man's voice grew nearer.

  “You can't basement him,” the woman said. “He hasn't been here long enough. You'll lose him.”

  “Then we lose him,” the man said. He was at the bathroom door. “We can handle him if he gets smart. There's no room for carelessness.” He flicked on the bathroom light.

  On the TV, Clive droned on. I bent my knees into a half-crouch and brought my hands up, ready to go for the eyes if the man opened the curtain.

  “Let's go,” the woman said. “I want to see the show.”

  “See it on tape. We've got the rest of the floor to check.”

  “Only because you were late,” the woman said. “We should be done by now. Sometimes I wonder about you. Sometimes I wonder why you're in the Church.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “None of it seems to mean anything to you. Not even Angel.”

  “Don't be silly,” he said, but there was an edge of wariness in his tone. “Of course she means something to me.”

  “Well, it doesn't seem like she does,” the woman said calmly.

  “What do I have to do, drop to my knees?”

  “Then let's go watch her. Come on, it's the only show of the day.”

  The man drew his breath in and let it out. Then he snapped off the light. “Okay,” he said, “but if they ask you, we checked the whole floor, right?”

  “Sure, sure,” she said. “Come on.” After a moment the outer door closed behind them.