The Four Last Things (Simeon Grist Mystery)

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Promise.” I gave her my hand, and we shook. Then she pressed my hand to her cheek, folded her other hand over it, and lowered it to her lap.

  She leaned back against the seat of the car and let out a slow breath. “I'll tell you how I found him,” she said.

  She'd called the Times bureau in Sacramento and asked a woman there to check the Church's board of directors. “It's a California corporation, right?” she asked rhetorically. “That's what that sleazy Brooks man said. That means their corporate articles and their board of directors have to be on file with the Secretary of State. It's a big board, and one of its members is a Mrs. Caleb Ellspeth. Mary Claire, in other words.”

  “Well, well. Did you get the whole list?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you got it?”

  “In my purse.”

  “And Caleb Ellspeth was in the phone book.”

  “No,” she said, sounding pleased in spite of herself. “He wasn't. He was on the Times subscription list. I went into the computer, and there he was, Caleb Ellspeth, right in Venice, only about a mile from me. I was so excited, Simeon. I mean, how many Caleb Ellspeths can there be in L.A.?”

  “Give me the list of directors.” She pulled it from her purse and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket. “Now tell me why you think he'll be home.”

  “The phone listed was his work phone. His supervisor or somebody told me he had special dispensation to spend afternoons at home and to work mornings and evenings. A sick kid, he said.”

  “What company?”

  “Miska Aerospace.”

  “What's he do?”

  “Some kind of engineer.”

  “Fine. Better than fine. Listen, I don't know how he's going to react. My guess is that he's been told not to talk to anybody. It could get a little rough, so keep a brake on the humanitarian impulses, okay?”

  “Oh, lighten up. You make me sound like Dear Abby. Golly, Simeon, what have we just been talking about?”

  “Golly,” I said mockingly. “I'm sorry about that. Just getting the ground rules straight.” I leaned over and kissed her hair.

  “Will wonders never cease,” she said, blushing slightly. “A sporting metaphor.”

  I started the car. As I pulled out into traffic, she said, “Those men would have killed you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think they would have.”

  Thirteen-twelve Ashland was a peeling one-story house with a glassed-in porch built in the thirties by a refugee from the East who didn't believe, and rightly so, that the California winters would be as mild as advertised. When he'd built the house it had had a view of the Pacific. Now three-story stucco apartment houses, the architectural litter of the fifties, made the block seem landlocked. The ocean could have been twenty miles away.

  Naturally, the porch leaked. I tried to remember the last time I'd been dry. I was giving up when Caleb Ellspeth opened the door.

  He didn't open it very far. A four-inch chain held it in place. His eyes were just about level with the chain. “Yeah?” he said, looking at the grease on my clothes. Then he saw Eleanor. “Can I help you?”

  “We're from the Times,” she said.

  He started to close the door. I got a hand against it and shoved back. He wasn't very strong.

  “Give me a break,” he said. “No one else has in years.” He had a wrinkled, oddly transparent face: pale skin like crumpled cellophane over prominent cheekbones, a hawk nose, muddy brown eyes, a skinny neck that vanished down into a white shirt that seemed several sizes too large. His hair looked like a hat. He wore it in a style that had last seen the light of day on a member of Richie Valens’ backup band, a black Reddi-Wip wave at the top and heavy graying sideburns that disappeared into the collar of his shirt and, for all I knew, ended at his knees.

  “We only want to ask a few questions,” Eleanor said.

  “I'm out of answers,” he said. “I was just going to run down to the store, pick up a few. You want to tell your mechanic here to let go of the door?”

  Eleanor laughed. “He does look like a mechanic, doesn't he?”

  “He doesn't look like a reporter.”

  “And I'm not,” I said. “I'm a detective.” Eleanor looked startled.

  “Better and better,” he said. “You two ought to talk it over. Ring the bell again when you decide who you are. If I'm anywhere near the door, I'll answer.” He tried to push the door closed again, but I shouldered it back. The chain snapped tight and held.

  “What we are,” I said, “is a double-whammy. A reporter and a detective. We're everything you don't want camped on your doorstep.”

  “Leave me alone,” he said desperately.

  “How would you like to be in People magazine? ‘Church Prophet's Father Living in Poverty.’ Then, of course, there'd be the National Enquirer. How would you like to be called as a witness in a murder trial?”

  ‘This isn't poverty,” he said. “And I don't know anything about any murder. And also, don't talk to me about the fucking Church. Beg your pardon,” he said to Eleanor.

  “I'm used to it,” she said.

  “You have a security clearance out there at Miska, don't you?” I said. “What are you cleared to? Secret? Top Secret? Eyes Only? How wide is your need-to-know scoop?”

  “Hey,” he said. “What do you got in your head, bugs? You can't stand out there and shout that kind of stuff.”

  “Then let us in.”

  “What do you got to talk about my security clearance for?”

  “How long do you think you'd keep it after you got famous?”

  “You wouldn't do that.”

  “I wouldn't even have a hard time sleeping.”

  “You must be some guy.”

  “A very nice lady has been killed. The Church is in the middle of it—not Angel and probably not Mary Claire, but the Church. I'll do anything I have to do to figure out why. Now, are you going to let us in, or do you want to practice your signature so you can sign autographs in supermarkets?”

  He tilted his head back, toward the rear of the house, like a man listening for something. Then he said, “And if I let you in?”

  “We ask some questions about the Church and then we go away and leave you alone.”

  “You'll never see us again,” Eleanor said.

  His mouth twisted. “You come in,” he said, “you gotta be quiet.”

  “We'll be quiet,” Eleanor said.

  “Okay. You want to move your big fat hand so's I can get the chain off?”

  “If you lock it,” I said, “I'll kick it in.”

  “Breathe a little more fire,” he said. “It's a cold day.” He pushed the door closed and the latch rattled. Then the door opened again and he stood there, a small wiry man whose clothes were too big for him. “Come in and wait here,” he said. “I got to check on something.” He turned and shuffled off down the hall. He wore battered leather slippers.

  We went in. The house was dark and smelled of food and an elusive chemical taint. Sickness. On a little table next to the door was a pile of unopened junk mail, computer-generated trash addressed to three or four misspellings of his name.

  “This is awful,” Eleanor whispered. “Half his mail is from Ed McMahon. It doesn't even feel like a house. It's just, I don't know, indoors.”

  “It's not going to get any better,” I said. “Don't turn into the Problem Lady.”

  Caleb Ellspeth appeared at the end of the hallway and beckoned to us. “In here,” he said, “in the living room.”

  The living room was a cramped little cubicle with so much furniture that it looked like a couch convention. The furniture had seen too much wear. Magazines written by, and for, engineers and machinists were scattered across the two coffee tables. Reader's Digest book condensations marched in uniform across a small bookshelf. War and Peace democratically shared a volume with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

  “So what do you want?” he said. “Wait a minute. If we're going to do this, we might as well d
o it. Coffee? All I got is instant, but I could use a cup.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Black.”

  “How about you, miss?” he said with an unexpected sweetness that made Eleanor's eyes widen. “Some tea? A Coke, maybe?”

  “Coffee,” she said. “That'd be fine. Black, like his.”

  “Okey-doke,” he said, shuffling off in his slippers.

  “Gee,” Eleanor said, blinking.

  “You softy.”

  “You're really not as nice as you used to be,” she said. “I don't know, with everybody else, I have the feeling that the plumbing fixtures are going to stay put. How come with you I feel like they're always pulling away from the wall? Why do I always feel like you're poking around under the plumbing?”

  “Because that's where the bugs are.”

  We spent several moments in silence. The room was cluttered and threadbare but as clean as Sally Oldfield's front seat. A picture of a woman in a beehive hairdo turned out, on closer examination, to be Mary Claire, squinting into the California sunshine as if its dazzle obscured her future. Finally Caleb Ellspeth came in carrying an invalid's tray. On it were three cups that were even worse-matched than the ones I used at home, a sugar bowl, and a creamer. He looked too frail to carry the tray, and Eleanor started to get up to help. I had to grab her wrist to keep her down.

  “Just in case anyone changes his mind,” he said, putting the tray down in front of us. “Me, I can't drink this stuff without a little help.” He began to spoon sugar into his cup. “Okay,” he said, “let's get it over with.”

  “I want to know about the beginning,” I said. “How you got into the Church. How Angel became the Speaker. What happened to you and Mary Claire.”

  He snorted. “Me and Mary Claire,” he said.

  “Anything,” I continued, “about how the Church works inside.”

  He stirred his coffee. “Is this going to be in the papers?”

  “Not with your name in it,” Eleanor promised.

  “If you tell me,” he said to her, “I'll believe it.”

  Eleanor took out her pad. “When did you join?”

  He shrugged. “Mary Claire joined first. About eight years ago. This was in New York, where Angel and Ansel were born.”

  “Ansel?” Eleanor said.

  “My son. Anyway, she liked the Church pretty much, gave her something to do when Ansel got her down, which was most of the time.” He put down his spoon and studied the surface of the invalid's tray. “Ansel's brain-damaged,” he said flatly.

  “I'm sorry,” Eleanor said.

  “Me too. Where was I?”

  “In New York,” she prompted.

  “Yeah. So she joined and she kept at me to join, and I wasn't that hot for it but Ansel got me down sometimes too, more than I could tell her, so finally I went with her and wound up hooking into a Listener.”

  “Did it help?” I asked.

  He looked at me reflectively. “Didn't hurt,” he said. “Nah, that's not right. Sure, it helped. I couldn't talk to Mary Claire because she always wanted to believe that it'd all be hunky-dory in the end and that I was the one who could make it happen. Anyway, it wasn't as hard on me as it was on her. I was in the Navy and I was gone a lot, you know? And she was always home, always having problems with the kid.” He took a sip of coffee. “Ansel, I mean,” he added. “Ansel was pretty rough on her. It's not easy when you're a woman, knowing that something came out of your body that probably ought to be dead. Anyway, that was how we felt at the time. So, yeah, it helped. It gave me someone to talk to.”

  “And when did you come to California?”

  “Not long after that. Mary Claire wanted to come, she was crazy about little Anna, who was the Speaker then, right? And I managed to get a transfer, and we came. The four of us,” he said. He swallowed once. “You're not drinking your coffee, miss.”

  “Sorry,” Eleanor said, taking a brave pull at it. “Just listening.”

  “Listening,” he said with an unamused smile. “Let's hear it for Listening.”

  “So you came to L.A.,” I said. “Then what?”

  “Things were better at first. We got a Mexican dame to hang around with Ansel, and Mary Claire started spending more and more time at the Church. There was a new Speaker then. It was okay with me if it made her happy, even when the bills started to add up and I figured that the Church cost more than everything else in our lives put together. So I was working at the naval station in Long Beach and she was passing out stuff at the Church, and so what? Like I say, it made her feel better.”

  He tilted his head again in the same listening attitude we'd seen at the door. I hadn't heard anything at all. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, standing up.

  “May I come with you?” Eleanor said unexpectedly.

  He shifted his weight uncertainly. “Sure,” he said at last. “I mean, I guess so. You're pretty. He might like to look at you.”

  We followed him out of the living room and through the kitchen, a fussy, bleak, single man's kitchen with an old chipped gas range. The door at the end of the kitchen was ajar.

  “These were the maid's quarters,” he said. “I guess everybody had a maid then. Got its own bedroom, bathroom, everything. All I had to do was put in heat. California people don't think maids need heat.” He pushed the door the rest of the way open and said, “Quiet, now.” Eleanor nodded soberly and we all went through the door.

  I stopped in my tracks so suddenly that Eleanor bumped into my back. “Gee,” she said.

  It was like Dorothy stepping out of the house and into Oz. Here, everything was color. Two walls were painted bright yellow and a third was peach. The fourth, the one that held the door we'd come through, was covered with a kind of middle-earth fairyland, complete with mountains, castles, hobbits, and elves.

  The entire ceiling was plastered with pictures. It must have taken Ellspeth days to paste them all up there. Illustrations cut from nineteenth-century children's books were interspersed with pictures of Disney characters, rainbows, waterfalls, an autographed picture of the Roadrunner and the Coyote signed by the genius who created them, Chuck Jones. There must have been two hundred of them.

  In the center of the room was a hospital bed cranked halfway up. The chemical smell was strongest here. In the middle of the bed, lying on his back and connected to a gleaming chromium respirator, was a little boy.

  He had Angel's golden hair, but his body was contorted and misshapen. His fingers clawed anxiously at the air. The respirator covered the lower half of his face. Ellspeth smiled, and years fell away from his face.

  “Hello, darling,” he said. “Look, I've brought you some new friends. See the pretty lady?”

  “Hi, Ansel,” Eleanor whispered. “What beautiful hair you have.”

  Ansel's fingers extended and two of them pointed toward Eleanor. Some kind of a sound came out of the mask.

  “Well, well,” Caleb Ellspeth said. “Well, well.” Eleanor went past him and took the crooked hand in hers.

  “Aren't you the lucky boy?” she said. “Your own room and your own window. I never had my own room when I was little.”

  It was true. Eleanor had grown up in the back room of a Harlem grocery. She'd slept in a double bunk bed with her two brothers until she was twelve.

  Ellspeth picked up a glass and held it in front of Ansel's face. “Lemonade,” he said. “I'll make you some lemonade in a few minutes and give it to you.” He looked at Eleanor, who was stroking the yellow hair. “Maybe the pretty lady will bring it if you're good.”

  Ansel's fingers had curled around Eleanor's palm. She looked back at me.

  “Sure, I will,” Eleanor said. “In fact, why don't I stay here? You finish talking and I'll keep Ansel company. Would you like that, Ansel?” The boy blinked.

  “I couldn't ask you,” Ellspeth said.

  “You don't have to,” Eleanor said. “But if you don't think Ansel would like it . . .”

  “He'll like it,” Ellspeth said. “Won't you, A
nsel?” Ansel held on to Eleanor's hand.

  Ellspeth backed slowly away from the bed. “Call if he's any trouble,” he said.

  “He won't be any trouble,” Eleanor said. She was beaming. “I've just thought of a Chinese fairy tale that I'll bet Ansel has never heard. I'll bet you don't know any Chinese fairy tales, do you, Ansel? Is there a chair I could sit on?” she asked Ellspeth.

  “Sure, sure,” Ellspeth said, as if embarrassed. He pushed a fragile-looking chair over from the wall and Eleanor sat down without letting go of Ansel's hand.

  “That's better, isn't it, Ansel?” Eleanor said. “Now we can be closer together. Now, listen, do you know where China is? No? Well, it's a long way away, farther even than New York, where you were born. Things in China take a long time to happen, and this is a long, long story, so if you go to sleep while I'm telling it to you, you won't hurt my feelings. But, boy, this is a good story.”

  Ellspeth tugged my sleeve. As I followed him into the kitchen, Eleanor said, “Do you see how black my hair is, Ansel? In China everybody's hair is black, just like mine. But this story is about a very special little boy, a little boy with bright gold hair, exactly like yours, but not so pretty.”

  Ellspeth went to a roll of paper towels hanging on the kitchen wall, tore one off, and blew his nose on it. “The kid needs a woman,” he said fiercely.

  “How much does he understand?”

  “The words? Not much. But he can feel her. He can tell a good person better than I can.”

  “She's a pretty good person,” I said.

  “Marry her,” he said, “if you're in a position to do it. You're a dope if you don't.”

  “Well,” I said lamely, “we were talking about you.”

  “Right.” He opened a cabinet under the sink and tossed the towel into it. “The big marriage expert. Let's go back into the living room.”

  In the living room he reseated himself and looked down into his coffee cup. “The Ballad of Caleb and Mary Claire. Like I told you, I was in the Navy,” he said after a gulp of cold coffee. “This is about four or five years after we got to L.A., and Mary Claire and I were getting along pretty good, I thought, I mean we were both in the Church and she wasn't picking at me about Ansel anymore. She seemed better, you know? Anyway, when they wanted me to travel I said okay and relinquished my hardship deferment. They sent me to the Philippines, Subic Bay. All these randy, cute little girls, all these guys going ashore, coming back with drip, syph, God knows what. I was the only guy didn't invest that ten bucks in cab fare, the only guy came home with a dry wick. I'd been writing her regular, getting not as many answers back as I wrote letters, but I figure, she's got the kids to worry about all day, and the Church, and what am I doing? Lying around reading Playboy and keeping the machine clean, so I plan this big surprise. I get home three days early, right off the boat I buy a dozen roses, a bottle of champagne, make reservations at Perino's, where I've never even been before—I mean I am ready to party Mary Claire out of her skin. Rent a limousine, get home about eight p.m., choke off the impulse to call out ‘Surprise,’ and stand in the front door listening to her moving furniture around upstairs. She was like that, you know? Ever since Ansel was born, too much nervous energy. Wake up at four a.m., start shoving the couch around. So I go up the stairs wondering where the bed's going to be this time, and open the door, and the bed's right where I left it, only it's fuller. She's on it with two guys. Two guys from the Church. I mean one of them was my Listener. I told everything to this guy, and here he is trying it all out on my wife with one of his buddies.