Simeon Grist Mystery - 04 - Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  “That’s dumb,” Hammond said without glancing at me.

  “He’ll spot it,” I said, “and then we’ll be back to nowhere.”

  “How are you going to talk to him?” Annabelle Winston said.

  “The press conference,” Bobby Grant said again, seeing his future written in the skies.

  “No,” I said. “I need more control. Captain Finch,” I said, but Finch was looking up at the same uniformed patrolman. The patrolman looked nervous.

  “Captain,” he said, “there’s this guy on the phone …”

  “I said no calls,” Finch said curtly, “and I meant it. What do you think, my jaws need exercise?”

  “He’s called five times this morning,” the uniform said, “and he’s threatening to call the chief. Needs to talk to someone on the Incinerator investigation. Says he knows the chief personally. Says he’s a—”

  “Tell him to fold, spindle, and mutilate himself,” Finch interrupted.

  “—television producer,” the uniform plowed along. “Norman something.”

  I got up again. “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  part three

  CONFLAGRATION

  I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.

  —Serial murderer Emil Kemper

  12

  Live and in Color

  This is what it said:

  You made me break a rule.

  You don’t know how important the rules are.

  If I have my way, I’d do five a night, every night of the week, every week of the year. The rules save lives. And you made me break one.

  You’ll be sorry. When I kill the others, you’ll be sorry. When I liberate your phlogiston and leave nothing behind but calx, you’ll be sorry.

  This one had been written in a hurry: same gold pen, same inexorably straight margins, but no picture at the bottom, no fancy first initial at the top. Like the dance card, it had been messengered. Same approach, different service, no lead.

  We could have been friends. I used to think we were friends. I hoped we could be friends again.

  You didn’t recognize my voice. Well, keep an eye over your shoulder. If you don’t recognize me before I throw the match, you’ll be sorry. Of course, you’ll be sorry either way.

  You saw what I did to your girlfriend. She made a lovely light.

  Tell your other girlfriend to be careful too. And, by the way, I don’t think much of the guy she’s fooling around with. Real drop in quality there.

  I’d attempted, but failed, to prevent them from showing that part. As it flashed onto the screen I wanted to perspire, but the makeup they’d caked on my face wouldn’t let me. I just tried to penetrate the glare of light pouring down on me to locate a friendly face. No deal there, either.

  I tried, the note continued.

  I really tried. But you’re an *******, just like all the others. So you’ll burn.

  The note hadn’t said ******* of course. It had used a much more descriptive term, which had been covered, for today’s purposes only, with asterisks. This was, after all, family entertainment.

  “That’s a letter from a man who has burned thirteen people to death in Los Angeles,” Velez Caputo said, bright as a silver quarter, into the nearest camera. “We’re coming to you live today to bring you this amazing story. The show that was scheduled for this hour, ‘Transvestites and the Women Who Love Them,’ will be shown tomorrow. And we’ll talk with the man the killer sent that letter to after this commercial message.”

  The lights on the set went out, and the television monitors facing the set went dark. The sound track to a commercial for disposable diapers boomed through the speakers, preternaturally loud, as though mothers and babies were universally hard of hearing. “Relax for sixty seconds,” Velez Caputo said to me with a smile that had probably sent her dentist’s kids through college. “I love live TV.”

  I smiled back, feeling the makeup stiff on my cheeks. I didn’t love live TV, but at least I could see again.

  It was Tuesday afternoon. Two days had passed, and the Incinerator had burned three people, two of them out in the Valley, in Van Nuys. Another departure from established procedure. The one in Van Nuys and one of the L.A. victims had been women, which had the effect of making things more urgent. The media were howling.

  Stillman had agreed to my insistence on the telephone that we do the show live rather than waiting the usual two weeks between taping and airing, and had even bought full-page ads in both the Times and the Daily News. Velez Caputo had come into the studio on Sunday afternoon to tape radio and television commercials, and they’d been on the air by Sunday night. Only in the L.A. market, of course. Norman wasn’t going to spend any money he didn’t absolutely have to spend.

  So the Incinerator was probably watching. I’d guessed that he followed the media, if only to see what they were saying about him. Maybe I’d been wrong. Schultz, for whatever it was worth, was positive that he did. Now that he wasn’t Captain Omnipotent, Schultz and I were getting along better.

  Schultz smiled at me.

  He was sitting rigidly in what I’d been told was called the Number Two Seat. I was in the Hot Seat. A couple of people I didn’t know filled seats Three and Four. No one had rushed forward to tell me who they were, but Schultz had vouched for the one in Number Three. Behind the cameras and the lights a sort of Peanut Gallery rose in tiers, people packed shoulder to shoulder in narrow, uncomfortable-looking chairs. Their clothes marked most of them as out-of-towners, and the way they gaped at me—those of them who could tear their eyes off Velez Caputo—reminded me of the old adage about fools’ faces. Few places were as conspicuously public as this.

  “Fifteen seconds,” said a man wearing a headset. The man had a nervous tic that effectively deprived him of control over the lids of his left eye. Velez Caputo smoothed her dress and licked her lips. Velez Caputo had wonderful lips, and no tics to speak of.

  There were, I’d been told, eighty people sitting out front in the Peanut Gallery. Among them were Eleanor, whom I’d been unable to talk out of attending, Hammond, and three of his boys. They’d followed her in, at a presumably discreet distance, when she absolutely refused to stay home. In exchange for coming, she’d accepted the deal: She had to leave early. In case the Incinerator was waiting outside.

  Velez Caputo gave her microphone cord a tug. It was attached to an oversized spool, like the one that lawn maniacs use to keep their garden hoses tidy. An anxious-looking man presided over it as though it were the only responsibility worth shouldering in the entire world.

  The lights came on. “Five seconds,” said the man with the headset and the tic. His eye was firing off random squints. “Four, three,” and then he held up a hand and counted down, two, one. He pointed a discreet index finger in the general direction of Velez Caputo. No one pointed directly at Velez Caputo. The little red light on the camera closest to her winked on.

  “They call him the Incinerator,” Velez Caputo said immediately. “He’s the latest and most sensational member of a breed that’s become only too common in this decade, the serial killer.

  “Where do these people come from?” She stopped smiling and assumed an expression of High Episcopal Seriousness. “What goes through their minds? Why do they walk among us? And what is it like to know that one of them has targeted you?

  “When people think about their deaths, what do they dread most? Is it death from a lingering disease? No.” She was reading off a transparent TelePrompter that spooled by in front of the camera she was facing, invisible to the people looking in, the same elite device used by presidents of the United States, and why not? She made a lot more money than the president. “Is it death by drowning? No,” she answered herself, just in case the folks at home had gotten it wrong. “According to a Louis Harris poll, it’s death by fire. By flame,” she said. “And that’s how the Incinerator kills his defenseless victims. We have with us today four guests.”

  The light on her camera went out, and I
saw myself, wearing makeup, on the monitors, looking as if I’d wandered in from the show on transvestites by mistake. “First is a Los Angeles private detective named Simeon Grist.” The words SIMEON GRIST appeared on the screen beneath my face, which had frozen into a sort of muscular death mask. In print, my name seemed foolish and wrong, like an alias assigned by a substandard intelligence service.

  “Mr. Grist,” Velez Caputo was saying about the idiotic-looking individual on the monitors, “is the man who broke up a child prostitution ring here in Los Angeles last year. He was retained by the famous heiress Baby Winston when the Incinerator burned her father, and now, as you’ve seen from the letter we just read, the Incinerator has threatened to burn him alive. It took great courage for him to join us today, ladies and gentlemen. Simeon Grist.”

  People applauded, and the idiot on the monitors grinned emptily. Hammond clapped, slowly and ironically. Eleanor sat forward, looking concerned. Stillman, behind the cameras in a nautical blazer, made up for my old pal’s lack of joie de vivre by applauding more enthusiastically than anyone. The light on my camera went off, and none too soon.

  “Our other guests,” Velez Caputo said, “are a psychologist specializing in serial killers for the Los Angeles Police Department, Dr. Norbert Schultz.”

  Schultz smiled in a nervous, yellow fashion, and I thought, Norbert?

  “From VICAP, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s central index, where national information on these maniacs is stored,” Velez Caputo continued as the monitors reflected a sallow individual wearing a blue tie with little red fish all over it, “William Stang.”

  William Stang didn’t smile. He probably hadn’t smiled since the day his wife fell through the ice.

  The man in the farthest chair had gotten up, and a woman took his place. Great, I thought, a surprise.

  “And, finally, the woman who’s being called the Homeless Heroine, the woman who fought off the Incinerator to save the life—only temporarily, I’m afraid—of Baby Winston’s father. Ladies and gentlemen, Hermione X.”

  Hermione X, not a new hallmark in alias creativity, had been considerably cleaned up. Wearing a mask that made her look like an aged Lone Ranger in drag, she waved at the audience. They applauded. She was a hit. She was also loving it.

  I was hating it a lot. “He could kill her,” I said over whatever Velez Caputo was reading off the TelePrompter, a stream of over-written conjecture about what has gone wrong with our society.

  “Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo said, swiveling to face me. It would take a lot to surprise her.

  “This isn’t smart,” I said. “She has to go back to the streets when you’ve finished with her, and he saw her. So what if she’s wearing a mask? He knows who she is.”

  “We’re paying for her security,” Velez Caputo said smoothly. I saw Norman wince. “Anyway, we’re sending her home.”

  “The woman doesn’t know her last name. Should be an interesting passport.”

  Caputo frowned at me, but Stillman’s face cleared.

  “Don’t worry about me, Ducks,” Hermione said gaily.

  “I’d think, Simeon—may I call you Simeon?” Velez Caputo said.

  “Call me whatever you want,” I said. I’d been warned that there would be surprises, but I hadn’t figured on Hermione.

  “I’d think, Simeon, that you’d be more worried about yourself.” The man with the headset was making frantic signals in the direction of the TelePrompter, his left eye sending out a semaphore of panic. She ignored him.

  “Well,” I lied, “you’d think wrong.”

  “And yet this lunatic has told you what he’s after. Specifically,” she added. “You.”

  “He’s not a lunatic,” I said.

  “He’s not,” Schultz said, leaning forward in his chair as he picked up his cue. “Clinically, he’s probably as sane as you and I.”

  “Sane?” Velez Caputo said, arching an eyebrow that probably required its own gardening staff. “He’s torching defenseless people!”

  “Precisely,” Schultz said. “They’re defenseless. He’s got a plan. He’s got rules. We’ve all got rules. Don’t cross on the red, don’t cheat on the wife, don’t do anything that might make you lose the job. Well, he’s got rules, too, and he followed them for a long time. They’re not our rules, but they’re rules. And insofar as the legal definition of sanity is concerned—whether he can distinguish between right and wrong—well, of course he can. And he’s proceeding anyway, in accordance with a program he’s created. He’s completely in control of himself.”

  “He’s very much in control,” Stang said. He’d interrupted a sentence fragment from Velez Caputo, but she looked at him as gratefully as though he’d just offered her the names and addresses of seventy Nielson families. “Your mass murderer, the guy who shows up at McDonald’s with an AK-47 and shoots thirty people, he’s maybe crazy. He kisses the wife and kiddies good-bye and slips a clip into the magazine and blows people away until the cops put a couple through his skull. He knows he’s going to die, and he doesn’t care. That’s crazy. But your serial murderer, he’s careful. He chooses one kind of victim exclusively, and one way to kill them, and he makes sure that no one will catch him. He looks both ways, so to speak, and when the field is clear, he slits the throat…”

  “Or throws the match,” Schultz said.

  “Or throws the match,” Stang said crankily. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter?” Velez Caputo said, smelling a fight.

  “Well, it matters to the victim, I suppose,” Stang said. “But, you know, when you’re about to die, there isn’t time to decide that you’d prefer a different form of murder.”

  “Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo said. Hermione cawed something, but Caputo ignored her.

  “He’s sane,” I said, “whatever sane means.”

  “He’s bloody crackers,” Hermione said. “You should have heard him laugh.”

  “Hermione,” I said, “can it.”

  “Time for a break,” Velez Caputo said to the camera, and the lights went down.

  “You,” she hissed to me, “don’t interrupt. We have to get a flow going here.”

  “Would you prefer that I leave?” I asked. “Want to fill some time?”

  “Norman,” she said, but she didn’t have to. Stillman was already there, standing over me and looking down with fatherly concern.

  “Simeon,” he said, “you haven’t said it yet.”

  “If I leave,” I said, “you’ve got an awful long time in front of you.” The computer behind Velez Caputo’s eyes began to click.

  “Fifty minutes,” she said to Stillman. “I told you live was a mistake.”

  “Thirty seconds,” said the man with the headset.

  “This is national?” Velez Caputo said.

  “You wanted it to be,” Stillman replied, demonstrating an Olympian mastery of the sidestep.

  “Can I interrupt?” I said as the man with the headset told us that twenty seconds remained. Velez Caputo looked from Norman to me. “Leave us alone,” I said.

  Velez Caputo gave me a stare packed with the kind of loathing I usually reserve for the poetry written by characters in novels. “That’s not how it works, sonny,” she said.

  “Five,” said the man with the headset, over the strident tones of a commercial for laundry detergent. “Four, three,” and he held up the fingers for two, one. He pointed vaguely in Velez Caputo’s direction.

  “We’re back,” she said, sounding very glad to be back. Stillman had retreated behind the cameras. “We were talking to Dr. Stang,” she said, making her first mistake.

  “Mr. Stang,” Stang said.

  “Of course,” Velez Caputo said, coloring beneath her makeup. “Mr. Stang of the FBI. We were talking about why you’re so sure that the killer is in control of himself.”

  “These people,” Stang said sourly, “serial killers, I mean, decide consciously to give up their own lives to take the lives of others. They exert eno
rmous control to do so.”

  “Surely that’s insane,” Velez Caputo said. Stang shook his head.

  “Painters,” Schultz interrupted, following the script we’d developed, “give up their lives—normal, secure, middle-class lives, I mean—to paint. Writers decide to write, no matter what. This man is following a kind of creative urge. It’s a twisted kind of creativity—

  “I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Velez Caputo said.

  “—but it’s a kind of creativity,” Schultz said doggedly. “As in any art form, he’s decided to accept the limitations imposed by his materials—in this case, gasoline and matches—and he’s trying—”

  “You’re a doctor” Velez Caputo accused him.

  “—he’s trying to take it to the ultimate, trying to do something that no one else has ever done with those materials, all the while facing the challenge of capture.” He sat back, having done that bit. Velez Caputo’s face filled the screen, and Schultz gave me the high sign.

  “You sound as though you admire him,” Velez Caputo said. “What about the deaths? What about the agony of the victims?”

  “No one’s forgetting about the victims,” I said. “All Dr. Schultz is saying is that it’s a mistake to imagine him as a drooling maniac, hovering in doorways waiting for someone to fall asleep. He’s got a highly developed set of criteria, and he’s almost certainly a very intelligent man. Probably a brilliant man.” Point two.

  “So what’s phlogiston?” Velez Caputo said, retreating to consult the TelePrompter at last. “What’s calx?”

  “Phlogiston,” I said, glad to get to an easy part, “is a bad idea from the early nineteenth century. It was a principle, sort of like an element, and it was proposed by a German chemist named G. E. Stahl as the thing that actually burned when anything caught fire. Calx was whatever was left over.”