Incinerator

19

All told, the bells went off three times that night. The third time, I went all the way to the kitchen, clutching Billy’s rabbi, and old Bravo barreled out the door, and two seconds later a bunch of coyotes exploded past me and down the hill in a mad scrabble of claws on granite. There was no way to know about the first two times, so I went to bed and spent a couple of hours watching a big reddish fire moon sink itself below the hills, waiting for peal number four.

Another great night’s sleep.

At ten in the morning, blinking and sneezing against the sunlight, I stumbled down the driveway and found the three-number note and sent it off to Schultz via the mailbox, in accordance with his instructions on the phone. My arms and legs behaved as though they’d never been introduced. I triggered one of my own wires carrying it back down. A bell in my bedroom rang derisively.

At eleven-thirty, Schultz called to tell me that the big Boy Scouts homesteading up in Happiness Hills had radioed in to say they hadn’t seen anyone around my house all night. They’d been using infrared binoculars.

“The nightlife in your neighborhood,” he said, “mostly has four legs.”

“What about that piece of paper?” I said. My teeth felt as if I’d been eating sand all night.

“It’s paper,” he said. “We got it three minutes ago, okay?”

I said okay and brushed my teeth for the third time.

At noon precisely, the phone rang again.

“You really should watch your language,” Wilton Hoxley said. Then he hung up. I sat on the floor and thought about shaving. I’d absolutely almost decided against it some fifteen minutes later, when the phone rang. It sounded as if it were getting a sore throat.

“I forgot to ask if you got it,” Wilton Hoxley said.

“I got it. What does it mean?”

“Don’t be silly. You’re the detective. You got it, well, goody. One down, two to go.” He hung up again, but this time I stayed on the line and heard a second disconnect, the coin-drop click a pay phone makes.

Scratching my chin seemed as good a way as any to pass the time. I’d run out of action the day before. After I’d scratched my chin really thoroughly, using no half-measures, I went into the bedroom and tried on my special survival outfit. It looked pretty silly.

Schultz phoned at one-fifteen to say that the bit of paper was eighty-pound coated Royal Roto stock, whatever that meant, and that it was clean of prints. The ink was carbon-based black, and the numbers were in a typeface called Bodoni, commonly used by IBM for its advertisements and manuals. Wilton was going high tech.

I hung up. There was literally nothing to do except wait for Wilton. Wilton came through at two on the dot.

“Do we have pencil in hand?” he asked.

“Do you want me to have a pencil in my hand, Wilton?”

“If you don’t, you’re going to miss something really, really important.”

I picked up a pen; he’d never know. “Shoot,” I said.

“ C! ” Wilton Hoxley shrieked into the phone.

I blinked. “See what?”

“See nothing, you appalling disappointment, C the letter itself. C as in castrato, as in castellated or crenellated, as in Alpha Centauri, as in Charlie Company or Able Baker Charlie Thomas or Checkpoint Charlie, all that disgustingly banal hypermasculine stainless-steel jockstrap military fireman jargon, as in Charlie Chaplin, or, for Christ’s sake, as in clue. This is a clue, Simeon the detective. C–L-U-E. Have you got it?”

“Sure,” I said. I wrote 127 on a pad and put C under it, feeling like a life-form that had been promoted beyond its capacity by some evolutionary Peter Principle.

“ C? ” Schultz asked when I called him. “What the hell is that?”

I’d thrown the phone across the room, splashed cold water in my face for what felt like the thousandth time in a week, retrieved the phone, and called him.

“You’re the psychologist,” I said, adapting Hoxley’s argument.

“One hundred twenty-seven C?” He covered the mouthpiece and said something. “Maybe a hotel room?”

“Have to be a pretty big hotel. What are we talking about? Room C on the hundred twenty-seventh floor? Room 127 on floor C? Who’s helping you out, Willick?”

“An address,” someone said in the background.

“I heard that,” I told Schultz. “I thought of it, too. One twenty-seven North or South Something, apartment C. Not much help, though, is it? Who’s with you?”

“Bunch of the guys,” Schultz said defensively.

“Which guys, Norbert? Are you at a convention of the American Psychological Association, or are they cops? Listen, is Willick there or not?”

“C is the third letter of the alphabet,” Schultz observed, ignoring the question. Someone in the room with him applauded. “Maybe it’s cryptology. Maybe he means three, which would give us a four-digit number, 1273, which might mean December seventh at three A.M., which is nowhere, or maybe it’s a word, maybe he means that all the numbers are letters, which would give us…”

“ ABGC,” I said unhelpfully.

“Maybe it’s a chord progression,” Schultz said a little wildly. “Maybe a song title. Anybody here play piano?” I heard laughter.

“It is a chord progression,” I said. “It’s a particularly ugly chord progression. Do you really think he’s playing ‘Name That Awful Tune’ with us?”

“No,” Schultz said. “But I’m not sitting on my ass making smug comments, either.”

“He said two out of three,” I said. “Since you’re sitting there wrecking your lungs with the boys in blue, why don’t you get some computer time and let the computer play around with it as though it were code, which I don’t think it is. I think he likes the idea of us chasing our tails until he gives us number three, and when he does that, I think it’ll be showtime, and I think it’ll be clear. Remember, Norbert, he wants me there.”

“When did you start calling me Norbert?” Schultz asked crankily.

“I have so little time left in the world,” I said, “that I can’t stand on formality. I feel-if I may say this, Norbert-as though I’ve known you all my life.”

“Oh, get outta here,” Schultz said, hanging up.

It was a little too late to get a suntan and a little too early for a drink. So I made a sandwich and threw it away, and sat and patted Bravo until he got bored with it and went elsewhere to try to dig a tunnel through his head with his left rear foot.

The next call came at four. Not 3:59 or 4:01, but 4:00. I got it on the first ring.

There was a crackling sound, like fire licking at kindling. It began faintly and then sputtered and grew. Then it stopped.

“Cellophane,” Wilton Hoxley said. “Old radio trick, courtesy of Orson Welles. Are you ready for your clue?”

“I’m sure glad you’re having fun,” I said.

“ Three,” Hoxley shouted. He crackled the cellophane some more.

“I’m waiting,” I said.

“You’re absolutely trying to vex me.” He sounded genuinely upset. “I’ve remembered you for years, virtually carried your picture in my wallet, and you turn out to be dross. What in the world has happened to your intellect?”

My eyes were squeezed shut. Thinking of Schultz, I asked, “The number three or the word three?”

“Who cares! ” Wilton Hoxley screeched. “Three, as in one, two, three, as in the perfect Trinity of Thomas Aquinas, as in Aristotle’s three elements, earth, air, and fire, as in let’s do a triple. Three.”

“Got it,” I said dutifully.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Hoxley almost crowed. His adrenaline spigot was at full open. “At the risk of becoming a mathematical bore, I have to tell you that three is doubly important. Three is where it’s going to happen, and three is the number of hours until it’s going to happen. What time is it, smarty-pants?”

“Four.”

“And what’s three plus four?”

“Seven,” I said. I was going to kill him if I got the chance.

“Well, just look at that, you’ve solved half of it. I’m sure you’ll get the rest of it. I’ll be so disappointed, of course I’m growing used to being disappointed by you, but I’ll be so very disappointed if you’re not there.”

He hung up, and I heard the coin drop again. Yet another pay phone.

127. C. 3. 127C3. 1-27-C3. 12-7C-3. I thought I recognized the pattern in which the numbers and letters were arranged, but I couldn’t find the context. I wrote them out eight or ten times, rearranged them, reversed them, listed them vertically and horizontally. I was so tired that I was repeating patterns without noticing it, but it didn’t matter; they were a mess in any order. I called Schultz but got a busy signal. Ten minutes later, I got another busy signal. Four twenty-eight.

I climbed out onto the deck and paced, staring at the mountains as they rippled through the heat and going through everything he’d said. Firemen and Alpha Centauri, Thomas Aquinas and Charlie Company. It was as though something were knocking on the inside of my skull, demanding to be let out.

At 4:43 I called Schultz again. Still busy. “Well, Jesus,” I said to the phone, “I sure hope it’s nothing important.” I slammed it down and it rang.

“He got them,” Schultz said. He sounded as though he’d just run a marathon.

“Got who?”

“Mommy and Daddy. He got them somehow.”

“You mean he burned them?”

“No. They’re gone. Not there. Missing.”

“How do you know?”

“We had a couple of men there. At the entrance to the street.”

“You shitheel,” I said. “Privileged communication, my ass. On behalf of my client, I want a refund.”

“After everything you told me, we were afraid he’d go after them.”

“Well, you did a terrific job of preventing it,” I said. “And you probably let him know I’m talking to the cops.”

“So what?” Schultz said. “At this point, who cares? Did he give you the third clue?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What was it?”

“Norbert, old friend,” I said. “I don’t think I’m talking to you any more.”

The phone rang fifty-eight times before it stopped. I ignored it and concentrated on making a nice long chain out of safety pins. A minute after the phone quit, it started again. By then I was in the bedroom, putting on a pair of swimming trunks and a T-shirt. Then I unchained my safety pins, put them into a Ziploc bag, and rolled it up in the center of my poor little suit of armor, moving on automatic, thinking only about 127C3. It was beginning to sound like a football pass pattern by the time the phone shut up. A mocking bird filled the silence in 6/8 time, and then the ringing resumed.

I picked it up. “I want information,” I snapped before Schultz could speak.

“So dial four-one-one.”

“Give it or good-bye. How’d he get them out?”

“We don’t know.”

“Tell me everything your idiots saw.”

“They were there all night,” Schultz said. “Nothing moved till eight, when Mommy came out in the Bentley. Alone. She came back, also alone, about eleven-fifty. Then the team changed. Total overlap, not a minute that no one was watching. Daddy never left the house. Couple of cars cruised the street, no one of Junior’s description, looking at the houses for sale. Some business in and out of the other houses. The Lewises have some construction going on, but the workmen parked in the street and walked down to their cars. None of them was Wilton. We’ve been calling the house every couple of hours, just to get the busy signal or do the wrong number act. The phone was busy from twelve-twenty on, which felt too long. The guys rang the buzzer at two-thirty, got nothing, and went in. Place was a mess.”

“What time did the workmen leave?”

“Two.”

“All of them alone?”

“Like I said, they parked on the street.”

“Swell,” I said. “Obviously, somebody missed something. You’ve converted me. I now share my client’s opinion of the LAPD.”

Schultz ignored the rudeness. “What did he say?”

“He said three. He said three is where it would happen, and three hours from now is when it would happen.”

“Three hours from now?” Schultz sounded panicked.

“Worse than that,” I said. “Three hours from four o’clock.”

“One-twenty-seven-C-three,” Schultz said. “I thought you said it would be clear.”

“You chew on it for a while,” I said. “My jaws are sore.”

After I’d gnawed my cheeks for twenty minutes, I dialed Schultz again.

“No other ways to get into that street,” I said.

“You were there,” he said, sounding frustrated. “It’s a cul-de-sac.”

“Maybe something runs real close behind it.”

“It doesn’t.”

“God damn it, Schultz, check. They didn’t go up the chimney.”

“All right,” he said a trifle sulkily. “Let me get a Thomas.” The phone clattered to the table.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” I said. That’s all it took, a two-by-four between the eyes. I fidgeted from one foot to another, not knowing who could get to it more quickly, Schultz or I. Mine was just down at the foot of the driveway, in Alice’s glove compartment.

Then I came to my senses, hung up the phone, jogged down to Alice, and opened the Thomas Brothers map book. The hell with Schultz; what I absolutely didn’t need was thirty-seven squad cars, three or four swat teams, and a battery of heavy artillery. ‘Bye-bye Wilton, at the first siren’s squeal. Anyway, they hadn’t been invited.

Page 127, Row C, Square 3, was a blank brown stretch surrounded by urban clutter. I finally located the legend. In print small enough to prove that I was getting farsighted, it said, San Bernardino County Fairground.

I left the Uzi up in the house; it didn’t seem like the kind of hardware I’d be able to get into the fairgrounds.

Ten minutes later, I climbed out of Alice, leaving my suit of armor rolled up on the seat next to me, ran into the Fernwood Market, and tore open an L.A. Times. There it was on page 5 of the Calendar section, right out in the open for any fool to see, filling the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds with adventure and merriment for all.

The Chivalry Faire.