Incinerator sg-4

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Well,” I admitted, “not at first.”

  “Even after the papers this morning?” Bobby Grant sounded personally affronted. “My God, front page of the Times. What are these people, blind?”

  “Do you see why I need you, Simeon?” Annabelle said.

  This was not going right. By now I should have been back out in the parking lot, sweet-talking Alice into starting. I drew a breath.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m quitting.”

  Annabelle Winston took a step back, and Bobby Grant put out a hand to steady her. Even at that moment, I’d never seen a woman less in need of steadying. Her eyes widened.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “It means I’m off the job. Finished. Kaput.” The word brought Velez Caputo to mind, and I shrugged it away. “You told me I was the only person on the case.”

  “You are,” Annabelle Winston said, her eyes fixed on mine.

  “Yeah? What’s he?” I asked, nodding toward Bobby Grant. “A skinless wiener?”

  Bobby Grant’s lower lip protruded even further. I wondered how much of it he was holding in reserve. Maybe he kept it curled up, like a butterfly’s tongue.

  “He’s not a detective,” she said, as though that answered everything.

  “He held a press conference,” I said. “He and you,” I amended. “You announced to the whole world that you’d retained me. You didn’t even have the courtesy to let me know. I wake up in the morning, and everybody except David Frost is calling me for an interview.”

  “David Frost is in England,” Bobby Grant said professionally. “If he weren’t, this is his kind of story.”

  “I don’t want to be part of anybody’s story. I’m a detective. I need a certain amount of anonymity in order to be able to do my job. Not to mention the fact that the guy who burned your father wrote me a letter and delivered it to my house.”

  “He did?” It was the first time I’d seen Annabelle Winston look genuinely surprised.

  “Himself,” I said. “When I took the job, I acknowledged that I was willing to go looking for him. I’m not willing to have him looking for me. I’m flammable.”

  “We made a mistake,” Annabelle Winston said contritely.

  “What are you talking about?” Bobby Grant said. “He’s writing letters now. That could be a breakthrough,” he added, sounding like Hammond Lite.

  “Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said. It was the vocal equivalent of a one-way ticket to Siberia. “Go away.”

  “But, but,” Bobby sputtered.

  “Just scram,” Annabelle Winston said. “Down the hall. Anywhere. This instant.” She snapped her fingers. Bobby gave her a betrayed look and faded about six feet behind her.

  “We made a mistake,” she said again. “All I was trying to do was light a fire under the cops.”

  “Miss Winston,” I said. “You succeeded. You also robbed me of whatever advantage I might have had in trying to find the Crisper.” She winced at the word. “What’s more, and what’s probably more serious, you pissed off the police. Before Bobby orchestrated his headlines, I had a chance at getting hold of whatever they have. Now I might as well be wearing a bell around my neck and a sign that says Unclean. They’re embarrassed. Cops are macho, you know. They don’t like to be embarrassed. It makes them feel impotent.”

  She lowered her head. “Forgive me,” she said.

  “I forgive you,” I said. “But I’m finished.”

  “We’re finished, Miss Winston,” echoed a male voice. “You can go back in now.” I hadn’t heard the door open.

  The owner of the voice was a young doctor wearing an ill-advised pencil-thin mustache. His face was the shade of gray that the relatives of patients don’t want to see. He’d been through something for which his training hadn’t prepared him.

  “Is he…?” Annabelle Winston let the question hang in the air.

  “Sedated,” the doctor said, touching the mustache with an experimental thumbnail. “This is the part that hurts.” He looked at me. “Changing the dressing,” he explained. “We have to put him out.”

  “I thought it all hurt,” I said.

  “He’s got third-degree burns,” the doctor said. “That means total loss of skin. The nerves go with the skin. Where he hurts most are the boundaries between the third- and second-degree bums. Where he’s got some skin left.”

  Annabelle Winston started crying. This was nothing controlled, nothing like the averted face in the suite at the Bel Air. This was tears and snot and screwed-up eyelids and a sound like someone exhaling golf balls.

  “Now, now,” the young doctor said ineffectually, out of his depth again. The mustache made him look like a kid fancied-up for Halloween. He put a hand on her arm, but she shrugged it off and grabbed my wrist. Her fingers felt like bridge cables. “Come in here,” she said fiercely. “Get your ass in here.” She dragged me through the open door with a strength that almost dislocated my shoulder. Bobby Grant followed us, hovering like a bad conscience. The doctor, abashed at the reaction he’d provoked, came in and closed the door behind us.

  “Take a look,” Annabelle Winston said shakily. “The brotherhood of the pumpkin.”

  Abraham Winston-what had once been Abraham Winston-lay in a bed that looked like one of the roasting racks at the Escorial, the Spanish palace of Philip II where heretics had been barbecued for the enlightenment of the Saved. The bed was a metal frame hitched up to a complicated series of levers and pulleys. Winston was swathed from feet to nipples in white bandages, and the skin that was exposed was covered with a ghastly, greasy white ointment.

  His head was enormous. It was swollen and blistered, all the features concentrated into an area in its center. His hair was gone. His face looked like the crimped end of one of Hammond’s cigars, eyes, nose, and mouth pinched into the middle. The eyes, mercifully, were closed.

  “Um, pumpkin,” the young doctor said. “All serious burn victims look like this.” I was looking at what Annabelle had hoped I’d never see, the reason it took her an hour to recognize her father.

  “Why not a real bed?” I asked. I just needed to make sure that I could talk.

  “We have to be able to turn him,” the doctor said. He’d used the time to recover his equilibrium. “You can’t change his bandages, you can’t put the ointment on him, without turning him.”

  “Why is his head swollen?”

  “Blistering.” The doctor made a small motion that took in Annabelle, asking me not to force him to discuss it further. His tongue snaked out and touched the bottom of the ridiculous mustache.

  “The head’s only part of it,” Annabelle said mercilessly, recovering her power of speech. She drew a gray silk arm across her face. So much for that suit. “Tell him about his lungs.”

  The doctor looked down at his feet. One shoe went back and forth, grinding out the cigarette he probably wanted. I wanted one, too.

  “He inhaled fire,” the doctor said. “He got up before the old woman threw the blanket over him. Perfectly natural reflex, of course. Anybody who’d been set on fire would get up. Try to run away from the fire. Try to find water, maybe. I’d do it, too. Even though it’s the worst possible thing to do.” He exhaled a quart of pent-up air. “But there wasn’t any water around. So he breathed fire.”

  “So he can’t talk?” I asked.

  “Nothing anybody could understand,” said the doctor.

  Bobby Grant put an arm around Annabelle’s shoulders, and she shrugged it off like an unwanted fall of snow. Her eyes were on her father.

  “Isn’t there someplace else you can take him?” I asked. “And what old woman?”

  “The old woman who kept him from burning to death there and then, may her soul rot in hell,” Annabelle Winston said. She was finished with crying; she’d put it behind her as though it had been a social gaffe. “At least then it would have been over quickly. Instead of this. And, no, you can’t move him. Even if there were anywhere better, which there isn’t. We already m
oved him once, from County USC to here. They didn’t even want us to do that.”

  “Burn victims just get worse,” the doctor said apologetically. “Infection. Every burn is infected. The skin, the hair follicles, are teeming with bacteria. Move them and they die. Excuse me, Miss Winston.”

  “I’ve heard it before,” Annabelle Winston said. “Take a look at Santa Claus, Simeon. Take a good look, and then tell me you’re quitting.”

  Bobby Grant put in his two hundred dollars’ worth. “I don’t know how you could,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “you’re not me.” I turned to go.

  There was a sound behind me, like the rasping of a file over iron, and I turned back. The human parody on the metal bed lifted a greasy, ointment-covered arm.

  “He should be out,” the doctor said worriedly. “A normal human being would be out cold.”

  “He’s not a normal human being,” Annabelle said, crossing to the bed. “He’s Abraham Winston.”

  “Schossshuaaa?” said the thing on the metal frame.

  “Yes, Daddy,” Annabelle Winston said. “I’m here. It’s Joshua.”

  “Surrammatagga,” said the thing on the metal frame, its open eyes locked on Annabelle’s. “Dhooo shomeshing.” With supernatural force, it lifted its shoulders and turned its head. “Dhooo shomeshing,” it repeated.

  “We’re going to do something,” Annabelle said in a businesslike tone. She turned and pointed a gray silk arm at me. “We’re going to get him. This is the man who’s going to do it.”

  The pumpkin head turned to me. Its red, tiny, swollen eyes bore in on mine and found me lacking. Then, with a clogged cough, Abraham Winston passed out.

  “Everybody,” the doctor said in a stricken voice. “Everybody out of the room. Now.” We all went. Even Bobby Grant had nothing to say.

  In the corridor, Annabelle Winston clutched my hand in hers. All the control was gone, washed away by tears and terror. “Say you’ll stay with it,” she pleaded. She’d gotten a case of hiccups. They made her sound twelve years old.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” Bobby Grant was smart enough to shut up and stay shut up.

  “You have to,” she said. “You’ve seen him.”

  “Maybe,” I said again. I shook the two of them loose and headed for the parking lot. Alice started with ironic ease, and I drove home, full of righteous determination to quit once and for all the next morning. When I got home, I opened a Singha beer and congratulated myself on a narrow escape. Resolving myself that I’d quit for good over the phone in the morning, I drank until dark. Then I went to bed and tried not to dream. I almost succeeded. I only had to get up twice for water.

  While I slept, Abraham Winston died, and the Crisper set fire to another bum. When I woke up and went down the driveway on my way to Eleanor, there was a new letter in my mailbox.

  PART TWO

  COMBUSTION

  6

  Starting Over

  This is what it said: You didn’t answer my letter. Is that polite? I want very much to be polite. Etiquette is one of the few things left to us in these times. I’m joking, of course. You couldn’t have answered my letter no matter how polite you are.

  The people I burn, they have no notion of what it is to be polite.

  Who are they, anyway? Biological misfires. Good for fuel but for nothing else.

  All right, perhaps the next-to-the-last one, the Winston man, was a mistake. Even if he was past it when we met. Past knowing, past doing. Can’t I make the occasional mistake? God knows, whichever god we mean, everyone else makes mistakes. Ahriman has his way more often than we would like to admit. Last night’s fire, however, was no mistake.

  You and I, though, perhaps you and I are brothers. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps you also are fuel. You would know more about that than I. Surely you can also smell the corruption. If you cannot, if you are also fuel, I will know it before you do. I will know it long before you do.

  There was a double space, a breathing space, exactly ruled out on the brown paper of the shopping bag, an ironic choice of stationery given the possession of Abraham Winston, possessions that included a skinless-wiener factory, a forest, and the paper mill that turned the forest into the paper bags that happy housewives carried home from his supermarkets. After the double space, the gold-lettered, precisely formed message continued. Still as long as we’re chatting, I am not the Crisper, of all the ridiculous names. It sounds like the place where you keep the lettuce. I am, respectfully yours, the

  — Incinerator

  “He’s in his forties,” Hammond said to the very full room. “No one younger than that remembers incinerators. The law against burning trash passed in 1957.”

  The comment fell flat. It lay in the center of the big conference table and writhed a while, waiting for someone to come to its assistance.

  “Hey,” said the cop who was working the slide projector. “We through with this thing or not?”

  “Not,” said the ranking cop in the room, a white-haired man with a flat stomach, high, narrow shoulders, and an alcoholic’s map of veins on his cheeks. “Just leave it on the screen.” He also had small, deeply set eyes and a mean pug nose that brought to mind the old joke about Polish bulldogs getting flat noses from chasing parked cars. The magnified version of the Incinerator’s letter, illuminated with metallic flames and floating spirits, remained on the wall. As before, the first capital initial was larger than the others, a carefully drawn Y arising from a bed of coals. Various people either looked at it or ignored it. There were a lot of people.

  “I remember incinerators, too,” Annabelle Winston said. “We had them in Chicago.” Next to her, nodding agreement, sat Bobby Grant, wearing yet another safari shirt. This one had enough pockets to outfit the expedition that found Dr. Livingstone, with spare room to bring everybody home in. He’d removed the gold earring, a sensible move, in preparation for this meeting. On her other side sat a man whose clothes featured more buttons than a nuclear submarine. He had four buttons on each jacket cuff, buttons holding down the points of his IBM-white collar, a tiepin that was a silver button with a little diamond in its center, and a ring that was round and flat on top like a heavy gold button holding his hand on the table. In front of him was a closed attache case. He had a mouth like a snapping turtle and a forehead like a Mercator projection, which is to say that it bulged in the middle. He had to be a lawyer.

  “So who’s Ahriman?” the ranking cop asked.

  “The devil,” I said, since no one else volunteered, “in Zoroastrianism.” People looked blank. “An ancient Persian religion.”

  “The Crisper’s a Persian?” Until he spoke, I hadn’t realized that Willick was in the room, but there he sat at the other end of the table, notebook in hand and chins blossoming over his collar. The question was greeted with a flinty silence, and Willick buried his drooping nose in his notes.

  “The Zoroastrians worshiped fire,” I offered into the silence. “Their good god was the creator of light and fire, and their bad god, whose name was Ahriman, was the creator of darkness. They saw the world as a series of twelve-thousand-year cycles of light and darkness, with first one god ascendant and then the other. They kept perpetual fires burning in their temples.”

  “They still do,” said a very small, balding man in civilian clothes who was sitting next to the man with all the buttons. He gave us all a bland smoker’s smile, unsheathing crooked amber-colored teeth. “I’m Dr. Schultz,” he said to me. “Dr. as in psychologist.”

  “Simeon Grist,” I said.

  “I know who you are,” Dr. Schultz said, making the teeth go away. The crinkly smile lines around his eyes stayed put, as though he’d drawn them on with a pencil.

  “Just being polite,” I said.

  Dr. Schultz had forgotten me. “He’s an educated man,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the projection of the note. “No grammatical errors, no spelling mistakes, good sentence structure, he’s got some familiarity with anci
ent religions. He uses perhaps frequently. Most people would say maybe.” He subsided, pleased with himself.

  “What my client would like to know,” said the lawyer to the room at large, tapping his briefcase for emphasis, “is what you’re going to do to capture this maniac.” He put his hand flat on the table again, and the gold ring made a clacking sound that put a large black period at the end of his sentence.

  “We’re working on it,” the captain said shortly.

  “With all due respect, Captain,” Annabelle Winston said, almost pleasantly, “I’m not sure you are. But maybe-or, rather, perhaps — that’s because we don’t know what it is that you’re doing.”

  “We’re doing everything that can be done,” the captain said flatly. “What do you suggest we should do?”

  Annabelle Winston thought for a second. “I’m not a policeman,” she said. “I don’t know what you should be doing. But I know what I’m going to do if you don’t make me happy. Tell them, Fred.”

  “We offer a reward of a million dollars,” Fred the lawyer said. Large cop feet scuffled nervously beneath the table.

  “After taxes,” Annabelle Winston said quietly.

  “After taxes,” the lawyer parroted, although his eyebrows, skyrocketing toward his hairline, revealed that this was clearly a bulletin as far as he was concerned, “to any citizen who conclusively identifies this… this Incinerator.”

  “My God, you’re turning it into the lottery,” the captain said. Nobody else said anything. Hammond pulled out a cigar.

  “Please don’t light that,” Annabelle Winston said. “I can’t stand smoke.”

  I stared at her. I’d seen her smoke. Hammond’s face turned the color of rare roast beef. Captain or no captain, it was clear whose meeting this was.

  “We’re prepared to post the reward at a press conference at two this afternoon,” Fred the lawyer continued. “That will enable the television-news operations to scoop the Times, as I understand it.” Bobby Grant gave a nod of encouragement.