Incinerator sg-4

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Until we get the all-clear,” Willick said. He blew on the back of his hand, caught me looking at him, and put the hand behind his back.

  “And how are we supposed to do that?”

  “On this,” Willick said, hefting a ten-pound walkie-talkie in his other hand. It said PROPERTY LAPD on the side in enormous yellow stenciled letters. They looked bigger than skywriting. “It’s already on the right frequency.”

  “Good, good,” I said, wondering if this were Hammond’s little joke. “Be terrible to be on the wrong one. You know, someone could be listening.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, giving me the ultimate reassurance. “I set it myself.” I think I smiled at him. At any rate, I felt my cheeks creak.

  “What about that?” I pointed to the phone, prominently positioned on the table between the beds. “See that?”

  “Oh,” Willick said. He didn’t say it loudly.

  “Might have been easier,” I said.

  “Well,” Willick said. He lowered the hand with the walkie-talkie as though it were suddenly too heavy.

  “Wouldn’t have required you to get up here carrying something that says LAPD on it, either.”

  “I hid it under my coat,” Willick said. He showed me how he’d hidden it under his coat. Only the letters LAPD showed.

  “You’re doing great,” I said.

  The thing snapped, crackled, and popped. Willick almost dropped it trying to tug it free of his coat. He’d snagged it on the orange Paisley lining. I helped him get it clear and then took it away from him. He stretched out a white, margarine-coated hand and closed his fingers on air, a good fourteen inches from the walkie-talkie.

  “Phoenix One to Phoenix Three,” said a gravelly voice.

  “Al,” I said. “Al, this isn’t funny.”

  “Wrong,” Hammond said. “It wouldn’t be funny if you weren’t clean. But you’re clean, so it’s hilarious.”

  “How many cars?” Willick was watching with a wounded expression.

  “We got three.”

  “All plain?”

  “What, are you kidding?” Hammond sounded aggrieved. “Sure, they’re plain.”

  “Radios?”

  “What do you think this is?”

  “I think this is a Triple-E ticket for Disneyland, is what I think it is. Schultz has to be Phoenix Two, right?”

  Hammond grunted electronically.

  “I want the cars to do a circle. The whole block, then the block beyond. I want them to do it twice. I want the walkers to do the same. And Phoenix,” I said. “That’s clever. The bird that rises from its own ashes. What if he’s got a shortwave, Al?”

  “He doesn’t know the frequency.”

  “There’s a telephone in this very room,” I said. “Right here, not six feet from me. Don’t tell me about shortwaves, and don’t tell me about Phoenix. And don’t use this again. When the cars and the walkers have done a double circle, call me on the room phone. Have you got someone there who knows how to dial?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Hammond said.

  “Right,” I said. “Sorry. I forgot that Schultz was there.”

  I turned off the walkie-talkie. Willick murmured in genteel protest. The whole family was on the force, I remembered. Just for insurance, I took the walkie-talkie into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet.

  “Settle down,” I said, as he fished it out. He looked at it, streaming water, with an expression of unadulterated terror on his face.

  “I checked this out myself,” he said. “I signed my name. I’m responsible.”

  The bathroom towels were white and fluffy, and I tossed him one. “So dry it,” I said. “And work on your heart rate. We’re here until the phone rings.”

  The phone rang five minutes later. Willick was sulking on the other bed, and I beat him to it. “You’re clean,” Dr. Schultz announced smoothly.

  “And you’re an idiot,” I said. “There are twenty things wrong with the way this was handled.”

  “We were going for broke,” Schultz said, unruffled. “If he’d been behind you, we would have had him. If not, no harm done.”

  “Thanks for the information. It would have been nice to have had it ahead of time.”

  “We couldn’t be sure how you’d behave, could we?” Schultz was working on silky. What he didn’t say was, We decided to make you a target, see if we could draw the son of a bitch out.

  “Is Al on the line?”

  “He could be. Would you like him to be?”

  “No,” I said in a tone of voice that sent Willick’s eye brows skyward with the force of the space shuttle. “I only asked because I wanted to propose to you.”

  There was a little muffled urgency, and then Hammond said, “Yeah?”

  “You’re both there?”

  “I’m here,” Schultz said serenely.

  “Al?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. I dumped Willick’s walkie-talkie into the John. Write it off as a loss, but don’t charge him with it.” Willick sat upright on the bed, looking ridiculously grateful.

  “That it?” Hammond asked.

  “No,” I said. “Your thread to the Incinerator, to use Dr. Schultz’s memorable phrase, is hanging by a thread. You do this to me once more, and you’ve lost me. I’m in the Des Moines Holiday Inn, Al.”

  “He’ll follow you,” Hammond said.

  “Interesting time to bring that up,” I said.

  “Simeon,” Al said.

  “Your cars, your walkers,” I said, cutting him off. “They’ve done two circles?”

  “Like you said.”

  “Tell them to do another two. Then phone.” I hung up.

  Willick was watching me as though he expected me to sprout razors from the ends of my fingers and go for his fat throat.

  “Alone at last,” I said to him, settling back onto my bed. Willick didn’t look reassured. He just mopped at his walkie-talkie.

  When I finally left, about twenty minutes later, it took me more than three hours to get home. I’d refused to speak to either Hammond or Dr. Schultz. I got partway up the coast and then turned around and headed back to Santa Monica, twice. I bought a pair of running shoes I didn’t need, watching the street so closely that I got the wrong size. I took every switchback and cul-de-sac I could find. It was after eleven when, reassured at last, I pulled into the turnaround at the foot of my driveway and climbed out of Alice.

  There was a full moon. It was bright enough to show me that the flag on my mailbox was upright.

  There was a sprig of some kind of plant in the mailbox. It smelled sweet. I don’t know anything much about plants, but it smelled a familiar kind of sweet. I tossed the sprig onto Alice’s front seat and trudged up the driveway to the house. Halfway up, wearing my too-large new shoes, I stumbled over the tripwire that I’d set up myself. I got a nice mouthful of loose dirt.

  I had a rotten night, full of dreams that were all fire.

  With the burn hospital receding into the rearview mirror, I headed over the Sepulveda Pass toward Bel Air. The only times I felt I could drive safely without one eye epoxied to the rearview mirror was when I went to the Bel Air Hotel to talk to Annabelle Winston. After all, as far as the Incinerator was concerned, that was something I was supposed to be doing. I almost wanted him to be watching.

  The meeting was the kind that you have just to have a meeting. Its highlight came when I realized that Bobby Grant now had two earrings. In the same ear.

  “Maybe he’s given up on you,” Bobby Grant said for the second or third time. He’d been agitating to hold his million-dollar press conference. He looked clean enough to wrap around a wound.

  “Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said, smoking the same kind of cigarette that she’d forbidden Dr. Schultz. She was seated at the table, wearing a russet silk suit and a pair of jade earrings, moving some papers around. She’d had two more phones put into the room. They squatted at the corners of the desk. “Use your head. He hasn’t done anything. He’s
not activated, as that little cockroach of a doctor might say.”

  “Activated,” Bobby Grant pouted. “You sound like an acting teacher I had once, except that he’d have said ‘motivated.’ ”

  “I knew you’d been an actor,” I said.

  “You did?” Bobby asked in his deepest tenor. “How?”

  “Just the way you carry yourself,” I said. Grant gave me a suspicious look.

  “What are we supposed to do?” he asked sarcastically. “Just sit here and wait for him to set fire to someone?”

  “Yes,” I said, sitting down. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. I’ll keep doing what he expects me to do and trying to avoid what the cops want me to do, and maybe he’ll communicate with me. If he doesn’t, we wait until he burns someone. Then, if he doesn’t contact me, you can hold your press conference.”

  Bobby gave the suggestion 25 percent of his lower lip. It made him look like a fountain. “Maybe we could just do a release,” he said. “Something about progress. Picture of the two of you.”

  “No,” Annabelle Winston said without looking up from her papers. Her father had been flown home for his funeral, and she’d accompanied the body, been photographed in a veil at the cemetery, chaired an emergency stockholders’ meeting, and flown back to Los Angeles, and she looked as if it had been a week since she’d walked around the block. In her spare time, she’d been running the business.

  “What’s this?” I asked her, holding up the sprig that I’d found in my mailbox the night before.

  Annabelle turned the page she’d been reading facedown before she reached up and took the small piece of greenery, which was in mid-wilt. She sniffed it, then shrugged her disinterest. “It’s some kind of herb.”

  “What is this?” Bobby Grant asked the heavens. “A segment of The French Chef?”

  “Shut up, Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said absently. She rubbed the leaves between her fingers, bruising but not crushing them, and then moved her fingers back and forth beneath her nose. “Fennel,” she said. “So?”

  “So maybe nothing,” I said, retrieving the sprig.

  Annabelle Winston inhaled the fragrance on her fingers again and then wiped them on her skirt. The woman was hell on expensive clothes. “Have you talked to anyone at your college yet?” Annabelle Winston said.

  “In twenty minutes,” I said. “Not that I expect anything.”

  “Please,” Dr. Nathan Blinkins said, rolling his eyes around the room as though he were looking for his headache. “Fire? There’s not a religion in the world that doesn’t involve fire in one way or another.”

  Dr. Blinkins was a professionally slim man with too much hair in some places and not enough elsewhere. He grew his silvery sideburns long and curly and combed them back to cover his ears, perhaps hoping to strike an average with the expanse of gleaming dome he called his forehead. He affected suede jackets, black turtleneck sweaters, and pre-faded jeans. If asked to describe himself in a single word, he probably would have suggested “imperial.” It was hot in his office, and he wiped his face with a Kleenex, leaving a film of white lint trapped in the postfashionable stubble he was cultivating. Blinkins had been my graduate adviser in comparative religions. Given how profoundly useless the degree had proved to be, I felt he owed me one.

  “I’m looking for someone who was here when I was,” I said.

  “Well, that’s fine,” Dr. Blinkins said with ponderous irony. “If you want to know about students who specialized in fire religions, I can probably help you narrow it to three or four thousand. As I recall,” he said, settling himself back in his chair, “you were here for quite a while.” He smiled to demonstrate the impossibility of the task. “In fact,” he added, “when you called, I wasn’t sure I recalled the name.”

  I gave him the nicest, which is to say the only, smile I could manage. I’d been at UCLA, in fact, longer than he had. “Let’s start with Zoroastrianism,” I said.

  “Zoroastrianism,” Dr. Blinkins said comfortably. He probably had a Parsi temple in his backyard. “Who are we looking for?”

  “A male. Tall, blond hair. Walked with a limp.” I felt the frailty of the description as I spoke it.

  “No blonds,” Dr. Blinkins said. “Zoroastrianism is almost exclusively the purview of Iranians now. Has been for some time.” He spread his hands. He had very clean hands. “Historical interest, you know. In fact, the stock, so to speak, for Zoroastrianism is down just now. Aboriginal religions, that’s the thing. Lots of room for a good paper. Zoroastrianism’s pretty much worked out. Unless you want to do a bibliography, of course. Always room for a first-rate bibliography.”

  “And I can’t think of anything I’d rather do,” I said. “But I’m looking for a man, not a degree, and the man I’m looking for is familiar with Ahriman and Ahura Mazda.”

  “Who isn’t?” Dr. Blinkins said with the very large and very selective blind spot of the scholar.

  “Doctor,” I said, just to puncture the envelope of his self-esteem, “this guy is setting fire to people.”

  Dr. Blinkins blinked. Then he passed long musician’s fingers over his chin and looked down at them. They had little threads of Kleenex on them. “Holy moly,” he said.

  “Excusez-moi” he said, opening a desk drawer. “I’ve heard something about that.” He peered into the drawer, pulled out a round shaving mirror, and examined his face. “Now how did that happen?” he asked himself.

  “This isn’t academic,” I said.

  Ignoring the comment, he tugged a Kleenex from a box and scrubbed at the lint. It left more lint. “Aha,” he said. If he hadn’t had both hands full, he might have snapped his fingers. Holding the mirror in his left, he used his right to unfold a linen handkerchief with a large B embroidered into one of its corners, and wiped his face clean. He studied the results, fluffed one of his sideburns, and dropped both the mirror and the handkerchief into the drawer. Then he winced and quickly picked up the mirror and checked that he hadn’t broken it. “I’ve heard something about you, too,” he added, apparently forgetting that he hadn’t remembered my name.

  “All too true.”

  “You mean,” he said calmly, opening his blue eyes wide to show me that he was impressed, “that you really are some sort of detective, that you’re looking for this maniac.” He slid the drawer closed with a nice, dramatic snick.

  “What about the other fire religions?” I felt I was swimming backward.

  “Well, really.” It was the verbal tic of a man who felt himself frequently imposed upon. He brought one of the hands to his mouth again and gnawed at a nail. A thick steel Rolex Oyster glinted on his wrist. “As I said, all religions are fire religions at heart. What are the candles for in a Catholic church? Don’t all Christians believe in hellfire?”

  “There are people in Los Angeles,” I said, “who are being burned to death.”

  “I’m not ducking the question,” he said, blinking rapidly. “I’m only trying to give you an idea of how complex it is. If there’s a common denominator among the world’s religions, at least in their earlier and purer forms, it’s fire. Fire cleans, it purifies. Gold is refined in fire. The Ten Commandments came to Moses from a burning bush. The Romans carried fire in front of the emperor. Every twenty years the American Plains Indians piled their possessions together in the prairie and set them on fire. Alchemists sought to reduce the universe to its elements through fire. Do you see what I mean?” He laid one long hand on top of the other and looked down at the ragged nail he had gnawed. Quickly, he put the other hand on top.

  I looked elsewhere.

  “Even during the Renaissance, Botticelli carried his obscene paintings to the Burnings of the Vanities in Florence. Fire equals light, and light is the opposite of darkness. Fire worship dates back to the ice age. The last one, I mean,” he added by way of clarification. “Look, we’re discussing a major religious theme here. Every religion worth its salt has put faith into purification, and most of them have chosen fire as the purifier. T
hink about the level of technology available to these people.” He grimaced. “They sat around fires, for heaven’s sake. Fire was an inescapable symbol.”

  I sat back, waiting for something that made sense. “Go on,” I said.

  “What do you mean, go on?” Dr. Blinkins looked at his Rolex with some irritation.

  “No more than another ten minutes,” I said. “Just free-associate.”

  “An unpleasantly Freudian term,” he said. Dr. Blinkins imagined that his loathing for Freud was legendary. “This is impossible.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Well, the Stoics,” he said. “They envisioned periodic world conflagrations, an intuitive guess at the expanding and contracting universe of modern physics, a world born out of an unimaginable fire and ultimately returning to it.” His eyes rolled again, this time out of sheer effort. “Heracleitus of Ephesus, around 500 b.c., said that the world is a never-ending fire, an eternal state of process. Fire is the ‘agent of transmutation’: All things derive from, and return to, fire.” He smiled apologetically. “As I’m sure you know, this was the concept seized upon by the alchemists, whom I’ve already cited, in their attempts to turn lead into gold through fire. Talk about wasted effort,” he said, in his regular-guy tone. I remembered that tone, and not pleasantly. “For Heracleitus, reason and consciousness were manifestations of the element of fire. By inference, brutishness, swinishness, drunkenness, and depravity are impurities and can be burned away only in fire. Fire is elemental; there’s nothing personal in it.” He was listening to himself with pleasure. “That’s interesting,” he said to himself, “most fire gods are impersonal.” He made a note on a little pad with his name

  printed on it. It said, NATHAN BLINKINS, PH.D.

  “So is my lunatic,” I said. “He picks them at random as they sleep in doorways.”

  “Surely, not at random,” Dr. Blinkins said. “Nothing in the universe happens at random.”

  “I’ll hold that thought,” I said. “You’re certain that you don’t recall this guy pursuing a fire religion.” Dr. Blinkins shook his spottily well-groomed head. “Okay,” I said, “Heracleitus. Let’s stick with the Greeks. They’re the common denominator, right?”