Incinerator

16

Construction of some sort was going on behind the house, and I had to squeeze Alice around a knot of shirtless Hispanics gathered around a long silver catering truck. I parked beside a powder-blue Bentley. The front door was standing negligently open.

I found him in the living room with a phone shoved into one ear, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe at 9:00 A.M. with the insouciance of a man who plans to wear one all day. The phone cord was about forty feet long, and he paced the length of the room as he walked, talking a stream of mostly numbers into the mouthpiece. A cigar grew like a brown tusk out of the left corner of his mouth. “Sit,” he said to me, pointing at the couch. “Fifteen minutes.” He made a little gesture with his index finger over the dial of his gold Rolex to indicate a quarter of an hour, just in case the words hadn’t found their way home. I sat on a fourteen-foot couch, covered in sky-blue satin ornamented with knotted little gold tufts. Kneeling in homage in front of it was a long veined marble coffee table on fat gilt legs, groaning beneath the weight of extravagant clusters of glass grapes. Marie Antoinette would have felt right at home.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. Then he said, “No, no, no.” He flicked the ash from the cigar into a potted plant. There were big crystal ashtrays everywhere. Talking numbers again, he paced to the other end of the room, dodging furniture with a bullfighter’s expertise, and deposited a fine tube of cigar ash the thickness of a roll of nickels into the center of a crystal bowl filled with potpourri. He had to reach across an ashtray to get to it. The ear that didn’t have the phone clapped to it was the hairiest I’d ever seen; he looked like Bottom in the first moments of his transformation. I watched his broad white back recede and then focused on an oil painting of a blond woman. Its subject gazed at the artist with the remote assurance of the truly beautiful.

He hung up the phone and gave me a mistrustful stare. “So who are you supposed to be?” he rasped.

“I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. Who I am is an acquaintance of your son’s.”

“He’s not my son,” he said. “I’ve done plenty, but I didn’t do that. And what about the cops? What’s the little freak done now?” The heavy lips formed a crescent moon with the cigar protruding from its center. The crescent’s ends curved up, but it wasn’t a smile.

“Is that your wife?” I asked, indicating the portrait.

He made cigar-ash snow over a miniature orange tree, weighing his answer. “Yeah,” he finally said, coming clean despite years of evident conditioning. “That’s the little bride. That’s the expensive little bride.”

“She’s a very beautiful woman,” I said.

“You’d be a very beautiful woman, too, you spent as much time on it as she does,” he said. “Weights, jogging, aquatic aerobics, facials, Retin-A like it’s ice cream, no ice cream, no meat, hairdresser four times a week, manicures, pedicures, cosmetic dentistry, sheep’s placenta injections, every year two weeks in Switzerland for a complete blood change. You want to see her about Junior?” He threw his cigar into the fireplace, where it nestled among others like a convention of supernaturally large slugs.

“Right.”

“Okay, okay. Another couple of minutes.” He looked sourly at the portrait and fished a fresh cigar out of the pocket of his robe. “I figure I got left about ten percent of the woman I married,” he said. He pulled the cigar from his mouth and gobbed a gray oyster of sputum into a Boston fern. “Two years from now, she’ll be completely new. It’s like getting divorced and remarried. Only more expensive.”

“Actually,” I said, just to pass the time, “she’s already completely new. The average molecule of human tissue has a half-life of two to three weeks.”

“Yeah?” He glowered at me over the newly lighted cigar. “What’s a half-life?”

“The amount of time it takes for half of all of any kinds of molecules-say, fat molecules, for example-to wear out and get replaced by other molecules just like them. And ninety-five percent of them have been replaced within a hundred days or so.”

“You’re shitting me.”

The satin couch was comfortable, and I was tired, so I kept talking. “Well, some go faster and some go slower,” I said. “Intestinal protein takes only about fourteen days. Bone, as you’d figure, lasts longer.”

He held up a hand as hairy as a tarantula. “Wait a minute. It takes months for a face-lift to settle. You’re telling me that the face she got nipped and tucked last month is gone by the time the lift is ready to take outdoors?”

“More or less.”

“Fucking hell,” he said. “Alice!”

He headed for the door next to the fireplace, but it opened before he got there, tugged inward by the lady herself. She wore a lavender leotard, yellow ankle-warmers, and a pink headband. Her face was filmed with sweat, but her eyes, the same pale sky blue as the Bentley, could have cooled the room. It was a very large room. “Yes, Eddie?” she said, as though she were talking to a tardy bellboy.

He stopped in midstride, and the phone began to ring. “This boyo’s for you,” he said in an entirely different tone, and picked up the phone gratefully.

“About Wilton,” I said as the cold eyes fell on me.

“No news is good news,” she said. “I suppose you have news.”

“Yes,” I said. “You might say I have news.” I got up. Eddie was spouting numbers into the phone like a verbal ticker tape. He did not seem at all eager to look at his wife. She opened the door wider in invitation and said, “In here.”

I followed her sculpted haunches down a long gray-carpeted hallway. She never glanced back. Despite a dark sweat mark, shaped more or less like sunny California, running down the center of her back, coolness seemed to flow from her. We turned right through a double sliding door into a windowless exercise room. Disco music pumped itself effervescently at us. The lack of windows was more than compensated for by what seemed to be an acre of mirrors that lined three of the walls. Other than the mirrors, all the fin-de-siecle decor had been banished. Maybe, when she was surrounded by mirrors, she was her own decor. She twisted a knob on the wall. The music stopped pushing the air around. “What about the little weirdo?” She still hadn’t faced me.

“He is your son?”

“I’d deny it if I could. What’s he done now?”

“What did he use to do?”

She waved an index finger at me. “That’s not going to make it, sonny,” she said. “I may not look busy to you, but I am. It would take months to tell you all the things Wilton used to do. And, to be frank, they’re not months I would care to spend, even in your company. How old are you?”

“Thirty-seven,” I said, surprised at the question.

“A good age,” she said. “I remember it fondly.”

“You don’t look it now.”

“If you’re going to flatter me, you might as well sit. Wait,” she said, holding up a hand. “Am I going to hate this?”

“Yes,” I said. She held her gaze steady. “You sure as hell are.”

“Then I need a shower,” she said. “Look at yourself in the mirror for a few minutes. You’re worth it. Get yourself a chair.”

She pressed one of the mirrored panels, and it popped open and then closed behind her. I pulled up a chair and looked at myself. Nothing I saw particularly surprised me, except that I seemed to be bleeding to death through the eyeballs.

After a few minutes, my reflection slid away from me. “So what about Wilton?” she asked, coming through the mirrored panel in a fuchsia bathrobe.

“When was the last time you saw him?” I began.

“Honey,” she said, sitting in a chair that was a twin to mine, “give and get. If you haven’t figured out that’s how it works, you’re a late bloomer. What about Wilton?”

This was the moment I hadn’t rehearsed. Up until now, I’d figured that I could put her off with generalities while I skillfully extracted precious information. Of course, I was exhausted, and that was before I’d met her.

“He’s burning people,” I said.

Nothing happened to her face. Nothing happened to her eyes. What she did do was look down at her lap and readjust the knot in her bathrobe. “I knew it,” she said to the knot. “It’s Wilton.”

“You knew it.”

“He was burning cats when he was ten,” she said. She finished with the knot and looked back up at me. “You a cop?”

“If I were a cop,” I said, “there’d be ten of me.”

“It was his father,” she said cryptically. “So what’s your interest?” She and her reflection crossed their fine ankles in perfect unison. “Oh, Jesus,” she said flatly. “You’re that private detective, the one in the papers.”

“So now you know. Your turn.”

“My turn for what? Give and get, remember? What do I get out of this?”

“What do you want?”

“Anonymity,” she said promptly.

“Can’t do.”

“Then get out of here.” She stood.

“You get,” I improvised, “the satisfaction of knowing that your son won’t burn any more people.”

“What do I care about that?” She was still standing. “At this point, what the hell do I care about that?”

“You’re Mommy,” I said, feeling like I was shouting into the wind. “He’s still a few shy of being America’s number-one mass murderer, but he’s got a good shot at it. Is that a medal you’d like to win?”

She turned to regard herself in the mirror. She looked at her reflection as though it belonged to someone else.

“You’re beautiful, too,” I said. “That’s a really terrible combination.”

She was still looking deeply into her own eyes. I counted five before she turned away from the mirror and sat. “He’s a genetic accident,” she said.

“Explain to the National Expose,” I said, dredging up two words of print from Edna Vercini’s desk. “They’ll love the way you look.”

She tightened her lips, and fine vertical lines appeared above them. Even Swiss blood exchanges couldn’t vanquish those lines. “You know who he is,” she said, biting and chewing the words. “Why do you need me?”

“Because I don’t know why he is. Listen, Mrs. Lewis, I’m the bait. If I make a mistake, I’m the barbecue.”

“May you make a lovely light,” she said. Her eyes were as clear and white as the arctic circle.

“Or maybe you’re the barbecue,” I snapped, suddenly furious. “The best psychologist in these matters,” I said, promoting Schultz, “thinks that all he’s done so far is just an avoidance mechanism. What he really wants to burn is you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, but she’d already sat up straight.

“This house would go like a matchbox,” I said.

“It was his father,” she said again.

“You asked me what you were going to get. Well, maybe you’re going to get to die of old age, as opposed to being Mommy flambe.”

She gave the bathrobe another yank. The lines above her mouth were vertical rivulets. “He was here two weeks ago,” she said. “He wanted money.”

“Did you give it to him?”

“Eddie did. About five K.”

“For what?” I asked. The answer popped into my mind. “Forget it. For a new car.” Her eyes widened momentarily. “What do you mean, it’s his father?”

“He was a fireman,” Alice Lewis said. “How’d you know about the car?”

“Skip it. And?”

“And Wilton hated him.”

I pulled my chair closer to her. It was easy; luckily for me, in my state, the chair didn’t weigh much. “Why?”

“How do I know why? Because I lived there. Because Wilton, that’s Daddy Wilton, not Son Wilton, didn’t like the kid.”

“Didn’t like him?”

“And vice versa. Little Wilton hated the shit out of Big Wilton. Poured hot fat over his feet once.”

“Where’d he get the hot fat?”

“Off the stove, where do you think?”

“What happened?”

“What do you mean, what happened? His father blistered the kid’s hide and went to work with only one shoe on. He had socks on, you see, when the fat got poured. By the time we got the socks off, the right foot was bigger than a football.” She shifted in her chair. “Wait, he didn’t only tan little Wilton’s hide. He sent him to school with only one shoe. Daddy has one shoe, Junior has one shoe.”

“Which shoe?”

“Which one do you think?”

I closed my eyes and saw it. “He sent Wilton to school without the shoe on his clubfoot?”

“Kid had to learn,” she said. I opened my eyes and found her watching me. “So it was rough. Little jerk,” she said. “House always stunk of smoke. His daddy’s smoke, smoke Daddy brought home from the fires where he made such a big hero of himself. It was a little house, just a one-bedroom stucco box stuck up on some dinky little lot in Reseda. The smoke filled the whole thing.”

“And where’s Wilton, Sr.?”

She looked over her shoulder as though she were checking for an escape route. “Dead,” she said. “After my baby and I left him.”

“When was that?”

“A year or so later. Wilton was burning cats by then, and Big Wilton appointed himself the Cats’ Avenger. He was always saving something. So he saved cats.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wilton was burning cats. Big Wilton burned Little Wilton.”

“Nonsense,” I said without thinking.

“Oh, but he did. Burned Wilton’s fingers. Did it twice.”

“What did you do about it?”

She shrugged. “What could I do? Eventually, I left.”

“Did he use a cigarette?” We were sitting there in that calm room, talking about the deepest pits of the soul.

“What do you mean?” She used the lapel of her bathrobe to mop her neck.

“To burn Little Wilton’s fingers.”

“No,” she said. She looked directly into my eyes. “He used matches.”

“Wooden matches.”

She stopped mopping. “You do seem to know a lot about this.”

“Why wooden matches?” It seemed to be the twentieth time I’d asked the question.

“They were handy. We used them to light the stove. And don’t say anything. Yes, the stove he took the fat from to pour it on his father’s feet.”

“He’s using kitchen matches now,” I said, just to see if I could get a reaction out of her.

“Makes sense,” she said placidly.

“Are you saving your face up?” I asked. “Do you think it can only wrinkle so many times before they stick?”

“So I left him,” she said, ignoring the nastiness. “And I met Eddie.”

“Classy guy.”

“I can still tell you to get out of here,” she said. “This is a security community. One minute on the phone, and you’ll be on your ass on the asphalt.”

“How’d Wilton like Eddie?” I asked, remembering how fastidious Wilton had been.

“Hated his guts,” she said. “Well, tough shit. Eddie killed himself to make friends with the kid. Bought him stuff, got him therapy-that was a laugh-took him places, took him to the track, for Christ’s sake. Eddie never even took me to the track. But Eddie likes junk, you know? You saw the house. He likes to surround himself with expensive things and then shit all over them to show it doesn’t mean anything. But his expensive things are junk. And Little Wilton, even when he was ten, Little Wilton could smell junk from around the corner. And Eddie doesn’t talk right.”

“Depends on who he’s talking to.”

She touched her index finger to the tip of her nose and pushed her head back slightly. “Not right for Little Wilton,” she said. “You know, Eddie wasn’t exactly the cavalier of my dreams, either. I’d always pictured someone who was a hero, like Big Wilton, shithead that he turned out to be, or a gentleman. Like you, even though you don’t like me. You’re obviously class. Listen to the way you talk. But Eddie’s a good guy. He doesn’t ask too many questions. He loves me, I guess, like he tried to love Wilton. I could have put up with Wilton not liking Eddie because, you know, maybe he was jealous or something. But what I absolutely could not forgive was that Wilton hated Eddie because Wilton was a snob.”

“So you kicked him out.”

“Honey, it was my kid or my husband. Being a woman is expensive. Wilton was too busy lighting fire to small animals and cutting out pictures from the Middle Ages and reading about clubfoots to write the checks. Anyway, he was eighteen-seventeen. It was time. We got him a nice apartment in Westwood, put him in that school, hoped he’d meet a couple of girls.” She leaned forward and tapped my knee. “You know,” she said, “he might have been all right if he’d ever gotten laid.”

It took an effort not to pull my knee away. “Why the Middle Ages?”

“Who knows? It was the only thing he liked. Eddie took him to the Chivalry Faire the first year, and the kid went crazy. Put pictures of castles everywhere, played that awful music all the time. Eddie took him three times after that, every damn year. Fat lot of good it did.”

“Did you go?”

“What’s there? A bunch of weeds, some jerks sweating in their costumes, and a plywood slum pretending to be castles. Why should I go? The first time Eddie took him, Wilton didn’t say a word to him. Just went limping around exploring while Eddie stood there and perspired. So we gave up. Sent him to college to get laid.”

“I guess he didn’t,” I said.

She crossed her legs and let the free ankle swing. “We thought he was going to. He came home from time to time when he needed money and told us about this perfect girl he’d met, how she wanted to move in with him except that she wasn’t that kind of girl, whatever that means. Except for the fact that she didn’t put out, she was perfect, although if she had put out, she wouldn’t have been perfect for Wilton. My God, we heard about her until I got sick of her name. How good she was, how beautiful. How she and he read poetry together and looked at pictures.”

“But you never met her.”

“I’m not sure he ever did. Nobody could have been that beautiful. This one wasn’t even white.”

The worm started to work its way up my back again. “You got sick of her name,” I said. “What was her name?”

“Eleanor,” Alice Lewis said. “Eleanor Chan. Chinese, can you imagine?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can.” My face was flaming. Whatever it had been, for Wilton it had been a grand passion, and I’d made it cheap with one thoughtless, unretractable remark. Even though I loved her.

“What happened to your first husband?” I asked, just to give myself some room. “Did he keep bothering you? Or Wilton?”

“He tried at first, but Eddie talked to some friends of his, and then he had an accident. He was-” She stopped. It was as though someone had pulled the plug from the wall.

“He was?” I prompted.

“He was laid up at home with two broken legs,” she said in a monotone. “From the accident.” Then she sat straight up and shook her head. “No way,” she said.

“The house burned down,” I said.

She turned back to the mirror, looking not at herself but over her shoulder at me. She breathed through her mouth once, then twice. “It wasn’t Wilton,” she said. A small galaxy of dimples appeared on her chin.

Despite the air-conditioning, my shirt was sticking to my chest, and I tugged it free. “Of course it wasn’t,” I said.

The dimples disappeared. “Go away,” she said. She straightened imperiously. “Finished?” she asked, ready to get up and resume her real life, whatever she thought it was. “Things burn,” she said.

“People, too.” I wanted to see her chin dimple again. It didn’t. “Do you know where he’s living now?”

“I didn’t know where he was living before. Now are you finished?” She swiveled to regard me directly. Annabelle Winston could have pulled it off, but Alice Hoxley Lewis wasn’t big enough for it.

“No,” I said. “You have to do one more thing for me.”

She chewed on it for a second. “What is it?”

“Wilton’s going to call and ask you if I’ve been here.”

“He won’t.”

“I think he will.”

“So don’t worry. I won’t tell him anything.”

“You’ll tell him I was here.” Her jaw dropped in a reaction spontaneous enough to make her son snub her. “And you’ll tell him,” I said, fighting back a yawn, “that I’ll be at home.”