Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  “He's opened the channel,” Dr. Schultz said impatiently.

  “What channel?”

  “The channel of communication,” Schultz said. “He's been alone with his secret, with his secret pride, for more than a year now. Now he's chosen someone, and the person he's chosen is perfect. Educated, sympathetic—he hopes—even conversant with ancient religions. My guess is that this man knows all there is to know about fire, from a physical, chemical, mythological, and religious standpoint. And now he's found a kindred soul. At least, from his perspective, someone he can play with. Please understand, Mr. Grist. You're one end of a thread. The Incinerator is at the other end.”

  “The Minotaur was at the other end of Theseus' thread,” I said. “No, thanks.”

  “He wants to talk, Mr. Grist,” Schultz plowed on. “Specifically, he wants to talk to you.”

  “You're grasping at straws,” I said. “He'll find someone else to talk to.”

  “He will not,” Dr. Schultz said. “He's chosen you. He's fixated on you, for God's sake. He's searched the world, and he's found a friend. Read the letter, would you?”

  “I've read it, thanks. He more or less suggests that he might throw his next match at me.”

  “He won't, if he thinks you're on his side,” Dr. Schultz said. “He won't talk to anybody else. Please. Ten people have died.”

  “One of them was my father,” Annabelle Winston said. “He killed Santa Claus.”

  Even her lawyer blinked.

  “Why won't he?” I demanded. “Why not get some newspaper columnist to write something, an open letter or something?”

  Dr. Schultz shook his head. “Newspaper columns have been written. He didn't respond. He hasn't responded to anything so far, and that's unusual, too. The rocket went up when your name appeared in print.”

  “Why? All it was was a name and the fact that I was a detective. I don't recall anything about a degree in comparative religion.”

  “Unless I'm wrong, Mr. Grist,” Dr. Schultz said, playing his trump, “I think he knows you.”

  The room didn't exactly whirl, but I put a hand on the back of the chair I'd just vacated. “Do that one again,” I said.

  “You may not know him,” Schultz said, “or you may have forgotten him, but I believe that he knows you. I believe that he read your name and recognized it and wrote that first letter. I think you're going to get more letters in the future. So, you see, you're not just one end of the thread. You're a clue.”

  I needed a moment to think, and they gave it to me. At the end of the moment, I'd made up my mind, and my decision scared me silly. Since I'd decided, though, I decided to lend Hammond a few points. I knew he 'd been slipping since Hazel left.

  “What do you think, Al?” I asked him. “I'll do whatever you say.”

  Finch cleared his throat. Hammond took his time, fighting down a grin. “I think you should stay on it, Simeon,” he said at last.

  “Can we hear the deal?” I asked, sitting. “Miss Winston's game plan?”

  “The deal,” Finch said, “is that you appear to remain in Miss Winston's employ.”

  “Forget it,” Annabelle Winston said. “He does not 'appear' to remain in my employ. He does remain in my employ.”

  “A thousand a day,” I said, trying to smooth my goose bumps. The son of a bitch knew me?

  “Done,” Annabelle Winston said, without so much as a glance in my direction.

  “Wait a minute,” Finch said. He didn't make a thousand a week, or anywhere near it.

  “Would you prefer the press conference?” the lawyer asked.

  “People magazine,” Bobby Grant chimed in. “Big print.”

  Finch tugged angrily at his pug nose as though he were trying to make it longer.

  “Since I seem to be the key,” I said, driving another nail into Finch's coffin, “I positively decline to participate in an investigation I'm not part of. I'll need the benefit of everything you've got, beginning with the strange cars on my street yesterday. Al?”

  Hammond looked at Captain Finch. After what seemed like a century, Captain Finch dropped his chin half an inch. I've seen football teams gain fifty yards with less effort than it took Finch to nod that half an inch. Hammond opened his notebook. “It wasn't easy,” he said for the benefit of his superiors. “The Sunday edition of the Times hit the streets at six-thirty. Figure the guy doesn't live in Topanga—no one does—and figure it takes an hour to drive there from downtown, where the fires have been. Simeon got the letter at about eleven, so that meant we had to find someone who'd been awake and more or less focused on the street between seven-thirty and ten-fifty.”

  “Spare us the difficulties,” Finch said sharply. “Just get to it.”

  “We found a kid,” Hammond said. “William Pinnace, aged fifteen.”

  It was my turn to grin. Billy Pinnace was the biggest grower in Topanga. He had at least a dozen marijuana patches tucked away in the chaparral. Of all the people on the street, he had the best reason to be looking for unfamiliar cars.

  “The Pinnace kid was very cooperative,” Hammond said, ignoring me. “There were four cars. A Cadillac, an old pickup—he didn't know the make—a Mazda RX-7, and a Nissan Sentra or something like that.”

  “Did he get license plates?” Finch asked.

  Hammond gave him a street-weary gaze. “Oh, come on,” he said.

  “It was the Mazda,” I said. I had the room's attention. “Why was it the Mazda, Dr. Schultz?”

  Schultz winked at me. It took me by surprise. “Zoroastrianism,” he said. “The fire religion. Ahriman was the bad god. Ahura Mazda was the good one.”

  “You pass,” I said. “What color was the Mazda?” I asked Hammond.

  “Gunmetal gray,” Hammond said.

  “The driver?”

  “Male, blond hair, thirties, the kid said.”

  “I'll want a full briefing later,” I said to Finch, just to rub it in. “For now, let's divide up chores: what I do, what the police do. Let's make it good enough to persuade Miss Winston to call off her press conference. And then let's go talk to Hermione.”

  7

  Aged Ladies

  “He was tall,” Hermione Something said in the voice of one who's been asked the same question many times. “Tall and thin and black. He looked like a big black cigarette.”

  “He was black?” I asked, remembering the blond driver of the Mazda.

  “Stupid,” Hermione Something said to herself. “Cops are stupid.”

  “I'm not a cop,” I said. Behind me, Hammond muttered something that might or might not have been a blanket defense of cops.

  “He is,” Hermione said, scratching a grimy leg. “You're with him, aren't you? What does that make you, a Girl Guide?”

  I tried to reconcile Hermione with the vision I'd had of her when I first heard her name. At the time I'd thought of an aged lady, a distinguishedly aged lady whose contemporaries might have been called Ora or Blossom or Mayme. With a Y. Hermione was a name that conjured up screened porches and soft evenings and silk fans fluttering like cabbage moths over white wicker furniture, something from the summertimes of long ago, when the hills didn't catch fire and the eucalyptus trees imported from Australia hadn't taken hold to spike the California horizon. A name with mint juleps in it. All that was left of the vision was the mint juleps. The Hermione I was faced with, in a relatively comfortable cell in Parker Center, was someone whose skin was coated in the kind of dirt you couldn't remove with steel wool, whose hair hadn't been washed in a month, and who would probably choose a mint julep over a pint of turpentine if the choice were at hand. If not, she'd have drunk the turpentine.

  “From England, aren't you?” I asked.

  “Who are you to say where I'm from?”

  “Girl Guides,” I said. “Girl Guides are British.”

  “Well, aren't you the nosy parker,” Hermione said. “What difference where I'm from? I saw him, didn't I? Am I going to get my blanket back?”

  �
�You don't want that blanket,” I said. “It's all burned. We're going to give you a new one. Was he black?”

  “A new blanket?” Hermione asked cannily.

  “Brand-new. Plus a hundred dollars.” Hammond sneezed discreetly behind me, but I ignored him. “Was he black?”

  Hermione rubbed a rope of dirt between her right thumb and forefinger. “You can get me out of here?”

  “Are you sure you want to get out? You saw him.”

  “And he saw me. He couldn't have been less interested. A right poofter, if you ask me.” She waved a limp and extremely dirty wrist in the air to indicate that any male who could resist her charms was a right poofter indeed.

  “And was he black?”

  “He was wrapped in black,” Hermione said. “He was as white as you and me.”

  “What else?”

  The wrinkles around her eyes deepened into rivulets. “Can you get me out of here?” she asked again.

  “Al,” I said, since nothing else would satisfy her, “can I get her out?”

  “Absolutely,” Hammond said.

  “You're out,” I said. “What do you mean, he was wrapped in black?”

  “Head to toe,” she said. “All black. Wrapped up tight, like I said, like a cigarette. Light hair, he had. The color of good champagne. Do you like champagne?”

  “I like beer better.”

  “Another member of the dreary proletariat.” Hermione scratched familiarly at something under her left arm, probably something I'd spent most of my years trying to avoid. “Where's the life these days?” she asked the world at large. “There used to be life.”

  “It's where it always was,” I said. “Hanging out in expensive places. What else can you tell me?”

  “Very tall,” Hermione said again, running a tongue over her lips before she disclosed her secret, whatever it was she hadn't told the cops.

  “What else?” I said again.

  “Walked with a tilt.” She pronounced “with” as “wiv.”

  “With a tilt?” I asked.

  “Wrapped all in black,” she repeated. “Walked wiv a tilt. Crippled. Clubfoot, if you ask me.” She got up. “Squeaked, too. Now where's that blanket?”

  Hammond said, “Squeaked?”

  Hermione was back on the street, and I was nowhere.

  I was in the precise section of nowhere where the burnings had taken place, the area Los Angeles calls Skid Row. Skidded Row would be more precise; it's where people wind up at the end of their skid. For a few people, a statistically dismissible few in these years of Republican optimism, the trapdoor beneath their lives drops open one day, and they find themselves on a slide, a slide greased with alcohol or psychedelics or opiates or racial discrimination or just plain rotten luck, and the end of the slide dumps them out on Skidded Row. Some of them bring their children with them. The American postnuclear family.

  What the hell did “squeaked” mean?

  I'd considered the idea that I knew the Incinerator and dismissed it as useless. I was inclined to agree with Schultz, up to a point: He might know me, but I certainly didn't know him. Our lives are full of people who remember us with love or loathing, and whom we've forgotten entirely. He'd sounded, in Hermione's description, like a fairly memorable figure: tall, blond, walked with a limp. I'd played flash cards with my memory for hours after the meeting without coming up with anyone who fit the bill. Of course, the limp could have been faked. The hair could have been a wig. He could have been a dwarf on stilts, too.

  Why hadn't he killed her? She'd seen him. Under the circumstances, chivalry didn't seem like an acceptable reason.

  So at four on a hot Monday afternoon, I was walking aimlessly around the outskirts of Little Tokyo in downtown L.A., looking at people with neither money nor hope, feeling guilty about Annabelle Winston's five-thousand-dollar check in my pocket, and—and doing what? Gathering impressions, I told myself. Visiting the scenes of the crimes. This was where they'd happened: This was where the Incinerator had materialized nine times, tall, black, slanting, and squeaking, over his sleeping, wine-sodden victims, poured gasoline on them, and struck a wooden kitchen match. The police had found wooden kitchen matches at all the scenes, broken matches that had failed to strike. I imagined him, frenzied, furious, desperate to light the sacred flame, flinging the defective ones aside. He must have been frantic. But he'd taken the time to stand there and strike match after match, moments that must have seemed like centuries to him.

  Gathering impressions, I looked down at two men, two unimaginably filthy men, sleeping as though they were dead in the doorway of an abandoned shop. Their limbs were sprawled loosely, and one of them had thrown his arm heavily over the chest of the other. I could have been John Philip Sousa, marching band in tow, and they wouldn't have known I'd paid them a visit.

  Setting people on fire, I thought, is a labor-intensive method of murder. For one thing, it requires that the victim hold still. First you had to squirt the gasoline, four times, according to the first letter, and then you had to strike matches until one finally caught, and the victim had to cooperate by not going anywhere in the meantime, while three or four or five matches broke or sputtered out before you got the one that did the job.

  Schultz came unbidden to mind—I certainly wouldn't have consciously summoned him—and said something about it being unusual that the Incinerator struck at people at the bottom of the social ladder, such a smug phrase, and I suddenly dismissed the Incinerator's verbiage about carrion and biological misfire, and imagined myself asking him the question: “Why the homeless?”

  “They hold still,” he answered in my imagination.

  Experimentally, silently asking someone for pardon, I nudged one of the sleeping men with my foot. He held still.

  I went knocking on doors.

  I must have knocked on forty doors, concentrating on the dreadful little apartments one story above the abandoned, urine-sodden shops, the apartments that faced the street and whose windows opened only ten or twelve feet above the sidewalk, before I hit Mrs. Gottfried. I'd been rejected in various dialects of English and Spanish before Mrs. Gottfried peered out at me through a door featuring no fewer than three slip-chains on the inside and said, “So? Nu?”

  It was a new dialect, at any rate. “I'd like to talk to you,” I said.

  “I paid the water,” she said. Her face was so narrow that I could see most of it through the two inches of cracked door, and her bright black eyes regarded me with enough distrust to suggest several lifetimes of unrelieved betrayal.

  “It's not about the water,” I said, searching through my repertoire of ingenuous facial expressions to find one that would reassure her. I failed.

  “So go away,” she said, trying to close the door. When she couldn't, she looked down and saw my foot wedged between the doorjamb and the edge of the door.

  “Move the foot,” she said. “You don't move the foot, I call the cops.” The accent might have been Polish.

  “Call them,” I said. “Call Lieutenant Al Hammond downtown and tell him that Simeon Grist is here. I'll wait. I'll even move my foot and let you close the door if you want, as long as you promise to open it and talk to me after you finish with the cops.”

  “Cops I don't like,” she said. “I seen enough kinds of cops to know they're all the same.” Then she squinted up at me. “You're no cop. Cops don't say 'cop.'”

  “No, I'm not. I'm a private detective.”

  “What's it to me?”

  “I've been hired by a woman whose father was burned to death on this street.”

  “Abraham Winston,” she said. “All the papers. I can read English.”

  “Weinstein,” I said. “Abraham Weinstein.”

  She looked down at the gnarled fingers wrapped around the door. “Well, I figured that,” she said. “Please. Abraham? My kids changed their name, too. Now it's Godfrey. Fitting in, huh?”

  “I saw him before he died.”

  “Ach, the pain,” she said, “I can imagin
e.”

  “His daughter saw it, too.”

  She kicked my shoe with a tiny black-clad foot. “So come in,” she said.

  The apartment was tiny and dim, crowded with dark, heavy furniture. There were carpets everywhere, and a smell of cooking in the air. Mrs. Gottfried was thinner than a lost hope. She gestured me toward the chunky sofa.

  “So sit,” she said. “Hungry?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me, too,” she said. “I cook for the smell. Smell is the sense closest to memory, do you know that? That was Freud, hah? I cook to remember. When it's finished cooking, I give it to them.” She pointed at the window, in the general direction of the homeless. “I been hungry, I know what it's like.”

  “Have the cops asked you questions?”

  “No.” She sat beside me, slowly and experimentally, as though she wasn't sure her body was up to it. “They tried. I looked out through the little hole I had somebody put in the door, I saw the uniforms. I hate uniforms, so I went away and let them knock.”

  “That was why you wouldn't talk to them? Because of the uniforms?”

  She looked at me as though I were the youngest and most innocent human being on earth. Then she stretched out her right arm and showed me the number tattooed on it. There was something formal about the gesture, like a lady at the Viennese Opera demonstrating the quality of her full-length silk gloves.

  “371332,” she said without looking at it. “It's a big number. They all wore uniforms. How neat their uniforms were, and how dirty we were. That was part of what was so terrible. When I got brought to New York, when it was all over, I couldn't take the bus. The man in the uniform scared me. I couldn't even walk, because how could I ask a cop for directions if I got lost? The uniform, huh? So I stayed home. A car backfiring in the street made me cry. I was crying a lot then.” She peered up at me, proving that her eyes were dry.

  “Who brought you to New York?”

  “My children. A boy and a girl, the boy older. When we saw how it was at the beginning, my husband and me, may God rest his soul, we packed them up and got them out. We sent them to my sister in New York. But we still didn't believe all of it, so we stayed. There was the business.” She smoothed back her graying hair. Her knuckles were swollen, knobby, and arthritic; they looked like the joints at the end of a drumstick. She could have removed her rings only with wire clippers. “The business,” she said. “My husband was in fur. We sold to the top monsters. We protected their wives and their fancy women against the cold. 'People will always need fur,' he said to me. We wrapped ourselves in fur against the Holocaust. Are you sure you're not hungry?”