The four last things sg-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Just forget it." She folded her hands primly and stared through the windshield at the rain.

  "It's the middle of the day. How do you know he'll be home? Doesn't he work?"

  She sniffed. We seemed always to be fighting in cars lately. "You could get killed," she said to the air, "and no one would know for days."

  "So could you. That's what I've been trying to tell you. These people do not give to UNICEF."

  "Stop treating me like Miss World Porcelain of 1988. At the risk of being tedious, let me remind you of a few things. I'm the one they can look up in the phone book, I've been more than a little helpful so far, and I'm the one who found him. I'm also planning to write this whole story, and I think you owe me. I want to know what's happening."

  "I think maybe you should move."

  "Don't be dramatic. In fact, don't be anything. Just shut up and drive."

  I drove.

  "Anyway," she said in an acid tone, "you're supposed to be good at your job. Surely it's not anything we can't figure out."

  "We already know who," I said. "What we want to know is who else, and why. It's whether we can figure them out before they figure us out. And I doubt it."

  "I don't. I'm an optimist."

  "Are you ever."

  "Optimism, as Larry McMurtry said, is a form of courage."

  "It can also be a form of stupidity."

  "Oh, Simeon. You're always so eager to stomp on anything that's growing. Except your stupid roots."

  I didn't feel like someone who was ready to stomp on anything that was growing. But Eleanor usually knew me better than I did.

  "So what happened to your cheek?" she asked a few miles later.

  "I hurt it killing somebody."

  "Am I supposed to believe that?"

  "Up to you."

  "Today?"

  "Of course, today. Was I walking around with this cheek last night?"

  "Jiminy Christmas, don't you think I ought to know about it? Who do you think you are, Clint Eastwood? I don't believe this. I don't believe you could kill anybody, and if you did, I don't believe you wouldn't tell me." She glanced discreetly at the speedometer and tightened her seat belt. Then she sighed. "I don't know, maybe I do believe you could kill somebody."

  I didn't say anything.

  "Oh, stuff it," she said violently. For Eleanor that was real profanity. "I don't feel like I really know you at all anymore. I'm not even sure I want to."

  "I'm not sure that you should," I said.

  For the next few minutes I concentrated on driving while Eleanor cracked her knuckles very deliberately, one by one. That was always a bad sign. When she started on the second joints I knew we were in for trouble.

  "Turn right on Fourth," she said very quietly. "And pull over."

  I made the turn and parked Alice under a big deciduous tree that still had a few leaves clinging hopelessly to its branches. Rain strummed flamenco on the roof of the car.

  "Here?" I said.

  "Here is fine. I've got something to say to you, and I want you to listen. I'm not going to rake over the past, and I'm not going to do character analysis on how you got to be the way you are. You weren't like this when I met you. You were a sweet guy who didn't know where he was going, but you were good at enjoying yourself. Now you're not so sweet anymore, and you don't seem to enjoy yourself very much either. Sometimes I look at you and it's like seeing a stranger through the window of a train. But other times, you're still Simeon."

  I flicked off the windshield wipers.

  "Maybe it's because we've never really stopped seeing each other," she said, "maybe if we had I'd notice a big change in you. As it is, it's been sort of day-to-day and more-or-less, like getting older. But instead of just getting older, you've been getting different." She fiddled with the buckle of her seat belt, making a metallic snapping sound. "But you don't seem to notice that I've changed too. I've been taking care of myself for three years, Simeon. I've published two books, okay? I've got a good job, if I decide to keep it. I've been through some men, nothing as serious as you were, but they've been there when I decided I needed them. When I needed them. Are you listening to me?"

  I nodded.

  "I want you to stop acting like I'm the person you met all those years ago. I am involved in this. Maybe I'm in danger. If I am, I want to be able to defend myself, and you have to stop pretending that you're wearing forty pounds of armor and biceps, and I'm the fair lady who needs protection. I'm not helpless. I'm not a little girl. I don't scream when I see a mouse or faint at the sight of blood. You have no right to keep anything from me because you think it might make me safer, and I don't believe for a minute that knowing less is going to reduce my vulnerability. And if you've really killed somebody, then I want to know about it not only for me, but for you too. Simeon, I want you to talk to me." She reached over and put her hand on top of mine.

  "Okay," I said. "Here?"

  "Right here. Right now. If you don't, I'm going to get out of this car. You can go find him alone."

  I told her all of it. When I'd finished she sat quietly, chewing on the ends of her hair.

  "Are you going to tell this to Hammond?" she finally said.

  "Eventually. When I have to."

  "Why not now?"

  "I want to work it out, Eleanor. I want to get the bastard who killed her."

  "It sounds like you already did. But of course, he's not the one you want."

  "No," I said. "I want the one who told him to do it."

  "He really pulled her fingernails out," she said, as though she was trying to digest a fact that contradicted everything she'd ever been taught.

  "Is there someplace else you can stay?"

  "I'll think about it. I suppose I could move in with Chantra for a week or so."

  "That ought to do it. If I'm not finished by then I'll give it all to Hammond."

  She directed a clear gaze at me. "Is that a promise?"

  "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 do 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."