Simeon Grist Mystery - 04 - Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  I could hear Annabelle Winston swallow all the way across the room.

  “And you know how to find her,” Schultz said.

  “Sure,” I said, feeling like an emotional lottery. “Get me the address on the name change.”

  For two more days, I stayed away from home, ricocheting around Los Angeles and threatening the drivers and pedestrians of Los Angeles by driving with one, and sometimes two, eyes on the rearview mirror, twelve to sixteen hours a day. Schultz was as good as his word, or if he wasn’t, I didn’t find out about it. I slept, when I slept at all, in hotels with multiple stories and internal elevators, safe from outside eyes, dozing no more than two or three hours before checking out and hitting the freeways again. I did the whole internal loop: Ventura Freeway to Hollywood Freeway to San Bernardino Freeway, cutting through surface streets in the Chinese enclave of Monterey Park before picking up yet another freeway. As far as I could tell he wasn’t behind me. But, of course, there was the dance card. I hadn’t thought he was behind me then, either.

  I’d never felt so disconnected in my life. No one I loved—or even particularly liked—was available. Eleanor was in a hotel somewhere, and even if she wanted to see me, I was afraid to see her. She might be with Burt, and Wilton Hoxley might be with me. Friends like Wyatt and Annie Wilmington were too dear to take a chance on hauling Hoxley along in my wake. Even worse, most of them had children. Little fatty children. One night I had a dream in which a child exploded in flame.

  Hammond hated my guts. No one can hate you like an old friend.

  From time to time, in various hotel rooms, I checked in with my answering machine before I collapsed, fully clothed, onto the bed. I slept lightly and badly, chased by dreams, and the hotel operator always awakened me after the requisite two or three hours, and I threw cold water into my face and hit the freeways again.

  No one got burned. No lunatics in rubber trench coats stalked any of L.A.‘s burgeoning skid rows.

  There were, according to Billy Pinnace, who had been deputized by me to check my mailbox when he was absolutely sure no strangers were around, no letters.

  Hermione had finally remembered her last name and been sent home to crawl the pubs, so another promise had been kept. The newspapers said that the heroine had traveled first class. The image of Norman signing the check had given me a brief moment of pleasure. Nothing more about Hermione.

  Nothing in the papers about Mrs. Gottfried.

  There was, in all, enough nothing to satisfy an atheist.

  The police did, however, find the Mazda, gutted by fire about three blocks from Normal Street. He’d had the nerve to come back after the fire and hang a blond fright wig over the remnants of the rearview mirror. Well, I didn’t have any doubts about his nerve.

  I was stretched to the point of transparency, beginning to be grateful when I saw only double, when I called the answering machine from some hotel or another in the middle of the night and got Schultz’s voice reciting an address.

  “It’s 13156 Via del Valle,” he’d said before hanging up.

  The hotel’s electric clock, thoughtfully bolted to the table in case the weary traveler tried to pack it by mistake, said 5:20 A.M. The weary traveler slept for two rotten hours before performing his habitual ablutions— two handfuls of cold water, thrown directly into the eyes—and hitting the road.

  Via del Valle, according to my Thomas map book, was a short, coiled rattlesnake of a street that had been brutally cut into one of the very small hills that comprised the exclusive San Fernando Valley enclave called Hidden Hills. Low ranch-style houses sat defiantly in the chaparral, daring the god of fire to drop by.

  Number 13156 was the paragon of the street, a fact easily deduced from its position: It was the highest, the largest, the house most vulnerable to fire. There was a buzz-box at the bottom of the driveway with a button, a microphone, and a square numeric keypad on its face, and unless you knew the numerical code, an acceptable answer given to the buzz-box was the only way to prompt the electrical impulse that would open the iron gates. The gates wouldn’t have slowed a fire down much. It was already 92 degrees.

  “Yeah?” growled a male voice. He sounded as if he’d just gotten up, and since it was only nine o’clock and since it was that neighborhood, maybe he had.

  “Wilton Hoxley,” I said.

  “Wilton? Punch up the goddamn code.” The voice was like a cigar’s garage.

  “This isn’t Wilton,” I said. “I’m here to talk about Wilton.”

  “So talk,” said the buzz-box.

  “Face-to-face,” I said.

  “Eat it,” said the buzz-box. It fell silent.

  I pushed the button again. When it beeped in response, I said, “Listen, it’s me. Or the cops.”

  “Well, shit,” said the cigar’s garage. “Goddamn Wilton, anyway. Come on up.” The gates opened. “Drive in,” the voice said.

  I’d been trained into obedience, and I drove in.

  16

  Hera

  Construction of some sort was going on behind the house, and I had to squeeze Alice around a knot of shirtless Hispanics gathered around a long silver catering truck. I parked beside a powder-blue Bentley. The front door was standing negligently open.

  I found him in the living room with a phone shoved into one ear, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe at 9:00 A.M. with the insouciance of a man who plans to wear one all day. The phone cord was about forty feet long, and he paced the length of the room as he walked, talking a stream of mostly numbers into the mouthpiece. A cigar grew like a brown tusk out of the left corner of his mouth. “Sit,” he said to me, pointing at the couch. “Fifteen minutes.” He made a little gesture with his index finger over the dial of his gold Rolex to indicate a quarter of an hour, just in case the words hadn’t found their way home. I sat on a fourteen-foot couch, covered in sky-blue satin ornamented with knotted little gold tufts. Kneeling in homage in front of it was a long veined marble coffee table on fat gilt legs, groaning beneath the weight of extravagant clusters of glass grapes. Marie Antoinette would have felt right at home.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. Then he said, “No, no, no.” He flicked the ash from the cigar into a potted plant. There were big crystal ashtrays everywhere. Talking numbers again, he paced to the other end of the room, dodging furniture with a bullfighter’s expertise, and deposited a fine tube of cigar ash the thickness of a roll of nickels into the center of a crystal bowl filled with potpourri. He had to reach across an ashtray to get to it. The ear that didn’t have the phone clapped to it was the hairiest I’d ever seen; he looked like Bottom in the first moments of his transformation. I watched his broad white back recede and then focused on an oil painting of a blond woman. Its subject gazed at the artist with the remote assurance of the truly beautiful.

  He hung up the phone and gave me a mistrustful stare. “So who are you supposed to be?” he rasped.

  “I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. Who I am is an acquaintance of your son’s.”

  “He’s not my son,” he said. “I’ve done plenty, but I didn’t do that. And what about the cops? What’s the little freak done now?” The heavy lips formed a crescent moon with the cigar protruding from its center. The crescent’s ends curved up, but it wasn’t a smile.

  “Is that your wife?” I asked, indicating the portrait.

  He made cigar-ash snow over a miniature orange tree, weighing his answer. “Yeah,” he finally said, coming clean despite years of evident conditioning. “That’s the little bride. That’s the expensive little bride.”

  “She’s a very beautiful woman,” I said.

  “You’d be a very beautiful woman, too, you spent as much time on it as she does,” he said. “Weights, jogging, aquatic aerobics, facials, Retin-A like it’s ice cream, no ice cream, no meat, hairdresser four times a week, manicures, pedicures, cosmetic dentistry, sheep’s placenta injections, every year two weeks in Switzerland for a complete blood change. You want to see her about Junior?”
He threw his cigar into the fireplace, where it nestled among others like a convention of supernaturally large slugs.

  “Right.”

  “Okay, okay. Another couple of minutes.” He looked sourly at the portrait and fished a fresh cigar out of the pocket of his robe. “I figure I got left about ten percent of the woman I married,” he said. He pulled the cigar from his mouth and gobbed a gray oyster of sputum into a Boston fern. “Two years from now, she’ll be completely new. It’s like getting divorced and remarried. Only more expensive.”

  “Actually,” I said, just to pass the time, “she’s already completely new. The average molecule of human tissue has a half-life of two to three weeks.”

  “Yeah?” He glowered at me over the newly lighted cigar. “What’s a half-life?”

  “The amount of time it takes for half of all of any kinds of molecules—say, fat molecules, for example—to wear out and get replaced by other molecules just like them. And ninety-five percent of them have been replaced within a hundred days or so.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  The satin couch was comfortable, and I was tired, so I kept talking. “Well, some go faster and some go slower,” I said. “Intestinal protein takes only about fourteen days. Bone, as you’d figure, lasts longer.”

  He held up a hand as hairy as a tarantula. “Wait a minute. It takes months for a face-lift to settle. You’re telling me that the face she got nipped and tucked last month is gone by the time the lift is ready to take outdoors?”

  “More or less.”

  “Fucking hell,” he said. “Alice!”

  He headed for the door next to the fireplace, but it opened before he got there, tugged inward by the lady herself. She wore a lavender leotard, yellow ankle-warmers, and a pink headband. Her face was filmed with sweat, but her eyes, the same pale sky blue as the Bentley, could have cooled the room. It was a very large room. “Yes, Eddie?” she said, as though she were talking to a tardy bellboy.

  He stopped in midstride, and the phone began to ring. “This boyo’s for you,” he said in an entirely different tone, and picked up the phone gratefully.

  “About Wilton,” I said as the cold eyes fell on me.

  “No news is good news,” she said. “I suppose you have news.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You might say I have news.” I got up. Eddie was spouting numbers into the phone like a verbal ticker tape. He did not seem at all eager to look at his wife. She opened the door wider in invitation and said, “In here.”

  I followed her sculpted haunches down a long gray-carpeted hallway. She never glanced back. Despite a dark sweat mark, shaped more or less like sunny California, running down the center of her back, coolness seemed to flow from her. We turned right through a double sliding door into a windowless exercise room. Disco music pumped itself effervescently at us. The lack of windows was more than compensated for by what seemed to be an acre of mirrors that lined three of the walls. Other than the mirrors, all the fin-de-siécle decor had been banished. Maybe, when she was surrounded by mirrors, she was her own decor. She twisted a knob on the wall. The music stopped pushing the air around. “What about the little weirdo?” She still hadn’t faced me.

  “He is your son?”

  “I’d deny it if I could. What’s he done now?”

  “What did he use to do?”

  She waved an index finger at me. “That’s not going to make it, sonny,” she said. “I may not look busy to you, but I am. It would take months to tell you all the things Wilton used to do. And, to be frank, they’re not months I would care to spend, even in your company. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-seven,” I said, surprised at the question.

  “A good age,” she said. “I remember it fondly.”

  “You don’t look it now.”

  “If you’re going to flatter me, you might as well sit. Wait,” she said, holding up a hand. “Am I going to hate this?”

  “Yes,” I said. She held her gaze steady. “You sure as hell are.”

  “Then I need a shower,” she said. “Look at yourself in the mirror for a few minutes. You’re worth it. Get yourself a chair.”

  She pressed one of the mirrored panels, and it popped open and then closed behind her. I pulled up a chair and looked at myself. Nothing I saw particularly surprised me, except that I seemed to be bleeding to death through the eyeballs.

  After a few minutes, my reflection slid away from me. “So what about Wilton?” she asked, coming through the mirrored panel in a fuchsia bathrobe.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” I began.

  “Honey,” she said, sitting in a chair that was a twin to mine, “give and get. If you haven’t figured out that’s how it works, you’re a late bloomer. What about Wilton?”

  This was the moment I hadn’t rehearsed. Up until now, I’d figured that I could put her off with generalities while I skillfully extracted precious information. Of course, I was exhausted, and that was before I’d met her.

  “He’s burning people,” I said.

  Nothing happened to her face. Nothing happened to her eyes. What she did do was look down at her lap and readjust the knot in her bathrobe. “I knew it,” she said to the knot. “It’s Wilton.”

  “You knew it.”

  “He was burning cats when he was ten,” she said. She finished with the knot and looked back up at me. “You a cop?”

  “If I were a cop,” I said, “there’d be ten of me.”

  “It was his father,” she said cryptically. “So what’s your interest?” She and her reflection crossed their fine ankles in perfect unison. “Oh, Jesus,” she said flatly. “You’re that private detective, the one in the papers.”

  “So now you know. Your turn.”

  “My turn for what? Give and get, remember? What do I get out of this?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Anonymity,” she said promptly.

  “Can’t do.”

  “Then get out of here.” She stood.

  “You get,” I improvised, “the satisfaction of knowing that your son won’t burn any more people.”

  “What do I care about that?” She was still standing. “At this point, what the hell do I care about that?”

  “You’re Mommy,” I said, feeling like I was shouting into the wind. “He’s still a few shy of being America’s number-one mass murderer, but he’s got a good shot at it. Is that a medal you’d like to win?”

  She turned to regard herself in the mirror. She looked at her reflection as though it belonged to someone else.

  “You’re beautiful, too,” I said. “That’s a really terrible combination.”

  She was still looking deeply into her own eyes. I counted five before she turned away from the mirror and sat. “He’s a genetic accident,” she said.

  “Explain to the National Exposé,” I said, dredging up two words of print from Edna Vercini’s desk. “They’ll love the way you look.”

  She tightened her lips, and fine vertical lines appeared above them. Even Swiss blood exchanges couldn’t vanquish those lines. “You know who he is,” she said, biting and chewing the words. “Why do you need me?”

  “Because I don’t know why he is. Listen, Mrs. Lewis, I’m the bait. If I make a mistake, I’m the barbecue.”

  “May you make a lovely light,” she said. Her eyes were as clear and white as the arctic circle.

  “Or maybe you’re the barbecue,” I snapped, suddenly furious. “The best psychologist in these matters,” I said, promoting Schultz, “thinks that all he’s done so far is just an avoidance mechanism. What he really wants to burn is you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, but she’d already sat up straight.

  “This house would go like a matchbox,” I said.

  “It was his father,” she said again.

  “You asked me what you were going to get. Well, maybe you’re going to get to die of old age, as opposed to being Mommy flambé.”

  She gave the bathrobe an
other yank. The lines above her mouth were vertical rivulets. “He was here two weeks ago,” she said. “He wanted money.”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “Eddie did. About five K.”

  “For what?” I asked. The answer popped into my mind. “Forget it. For a new car.” Her eyes widened momentarily. “What do you mean, it’s his father?”

  “He was a fireman,” Alice Lewis said. “How’d you know about the car?”

  “Skip it. And?”

  “And Wilton hated him.”

  I pulled my chair closer to her. It was easy; luckily for me, in my state, the chair didn’t weigh much. “Why?”

  “How do I know why? Because I lived there. Because Wilton, that’s Daddy Wilton, not Son Wilton, didn’t like the kid.”

  “Didn’t like him?”

  “And vice versa. Little Wilton hated the shit out of Big Wilton. Poured hot fat over his feet once.”

  “Where’d he get the hot fat?”

  “Off the stove, where do you think?”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean, what happened? His father blistered the kid’s hide and went to work with only one shoe on. He had socks on, you see, when the fat got poured. By the time we got the socks off, the right foot was bigger than a football.” She shifted in her chair. “Wait, he didn’t only tan little Wilton’s hide. He sent him to school with only one shoe. Daddy has one shoe, Junior has one shoe.”

  “Which shoe?”

  “Which one do you think?”

  I closed my eyes and saw it. “He sent Wilton to school without the shoe on his clubfoot?”

  “Kid had to learn,” she said. I opened my eyes and found her watching me. “So it was rough. Little jerk,” she said. “House always stunk of smoke. His daddy’s smoke, smoke Daddy brought home from the fires where he made such a big hero of himself. It was a little house, just a one-bedroom stucco box stuck up on some dinky little lot in Reseda. The smoke filled the whole thing.”

  “And where’s Wilton, Sr.?”