Incinerator

4

The phone started in at eight o’clock. It rang several times, penetrating a rather large region of murky pain that turned out to be the inside of my head. When it became apparent that the phone had more stamina than I did, I rolled over and picked the damn thing up.

“Hang up and call me tomorrow,” were my first words of the bright new day. I’d sweated into the sheets, and they were damp and wadded. They stank of whiskey and smoke and the Red Dog and something even ranker, something I couldn’t place.

“This is Channel Five,” said the female voice on the other end, as though that explained everything.

“I don’t care if it’s the Channel Islands,” I said. “Get the hell out of my ear.” I hung up, hard enough to crack the handset. Then I rolled over, clutched the dank pillow to me, and pretended that the pillow was my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan. Eleanor smelled better, but she wasn’t there. My eyelids scratched and closed over shards of broken glass, and I dozed instantly.

I hadn’t even had time to work up an erotic dream when the phone screamed again. “What time is it?” I demanded.

“Eight-twelve by my unreliable, mass-produced watch,” said a supernaturally cheerful voice, “Seventeen jewels, and all of them fakes. How you doing, Simeon?”

“What a goddamn stupid question,” I said.

“This is Pat.”

In the whole world, I couldn’t think of a soul named Pat. Pat Nixon came belatedly to mind. She was dead, though, and this was a male.

“Patrick Henry, at the Times.”

I rubbed my eyes with a hand that smelled like a rubber glove full of wet cigars. It had to be important for Pat to call himself Patrick. He’d been my student once, when I was still teaching English at UCLA.

“You’re up early,” I said. Good. I congratulated myself. A civil sentence.

“And you’re on the front page,” Pat said.

“Slowly, Patrick,” I said. “Of what?”

“The Times.”

It took both hands to make my head feel smaller. “Pat,” I said, pressing the phone between ear and shoulder and working on my temples with fingers that felt like Smithfield hams, “it’s Sunday.”

“That means you’re reaching our biggest circulation,” he said proudly. He’d always been a smart-ass.

“Sunday,” I said, “is a day of rest. Go rest somewhere.” He sputtered at me, but I hung up. Then, at long last, I yanked the cord out of the back of the phone, rolled over onto my left side, and grabbed my other pillow. It smelled terrible in a familiar fashion. It growled at me.

“God damn it, Bravo,” I said, shoving at the foul-smelling pillow, “where did you come from?”

Bravo Corrigan, Topanga’s itinerant generic dog, exhaled a bagful of dead fish at me, got to all four feet, and shambled to the foot of the bed, pausing just long enough to shake himself. With a fine snowfall of long dog hairs settling over me, I shut my scratchy eyes and aimed myself toward the Land of Nod.

Bravo’s stomach rumbled. I forced my eyes to remain closed. I thought about getting a drink of water. I thought about it for so long that I finally fell back asleep and dreamed of helicopters dumping tons of cool water over acres of fire. It didn’t do any good. The water exploded like gasoline.

When a hand touched my shoulder, I jumped all the way to the foot of the bed, clawing at the air for a weapon. Instead, my foot found Bravo, and then my other foot found nothing at all, and I collapsed on the floor, shoulder first.

“For heaven’s sake, Simeon,” Eleanor Chan said.

I got my eyes open and focused with an effort that seemed to involve even my stomach muscles. Eleanor stood there, looking cool and unruffled and amused, wearing a loose, wrinkled white shirt-one of mine, from the years when we’d lived together-and tight, ragged bleached jeans with a rip exposing one creamy knee. She’d had her black, perfectly straight hair cut short and spiky on top. On her it looked good.

“You’re green,” Eleanor said. She’d always been observant.

“Hammond,” I said by way of explanation. I tried to unknot my legs. “Dawn patrol.”

“Poor baby,” she said. She liked Hammond. I liked him, too, but I’d never have called him baby. “And speaking of Baby,” she said, holding out a newspaper.

“I can’t read,” I said desperately. “I can barely talk.” I became aware of the fact that I was naked and plucked up a corner of the dank sheet. Eleanor laughed.

“The media should see you now,” she said. “Hello, Bravo.” Bravo’s tail thumped.

“Eleanor,” I said, getting experimentally to my feet. The room swam. “Can I go dynamite my teeth or something before you start telling me about the media?”

“You’re a star,” she said, waving the paper at me in an aggressive fashion.

I shrugged it off for the moment and slipped laboriously into a pair of drawstring pants. Standing on my left leg took most of my day’s meager allotment of equilibrium. “Make coffee,” I said, barely avoiding dropping to my knees in supplication. “Please?” I went into the bathroom and tried to scrub off the residue of the night. Hot, cold, hot, cold. Then some more cold. Wash the hair twice. Slap both sides of the face sharply under the stream of icy water. It was a routine I’d practiced frequently in the weeks since Hammond’s wife had left. Hammond was doing fine, I reflected, pulling on a T-shirt. I was the one who was turning into an alcoholic.

I heard Eleanor puttering familiarly around in the kitchen of the house she’d rented for us all those years ago as I combed my hair with trembling fingers and checked the mirror for signs of permanent damage. My parents’ durable genes had survived another fusillade of abuse. I still looked like someone to whom you might conceivably lend a quarter.

Two cups of Eleanor’s bitter, highly stimulating coffee later, I was wired enough to look at the Times. “How do you do it?” I asked. “Have you got a corner on the caffeine they take out of decaf?”

“You’ll need it,” she said, handing me the paper. Bravo, sitting directly on Eleanor’s feet, watched it suspiciously. Whoever his original owner had been before Bravo gave him a final high-five and went out to play the field, he’d apparently been a member of the rolled-up newspaper school of training. “This is going to make you really popular with the cops.”

I glanced down and read. My eyes closed of their own accord. “Mother of God,” I said. And that was just the headline.

MILLIONAIRE IMMOLATED ON SKID ROW, it said. Under that, in type the size of John Hancock’s signature: HEIRESS ACCUSES POLICE OF INCOMPETENCE.

“It gets better,” Eleanor said over the rim of her cup.

Taking another sip of coffee, I accidentally cracked the heavy mug against my front teeth. It helped me to focus.

Police spokespersons last night positively identified a transient who was doused with gasoline and set on fire Thursday night on Skid Row as Chicago multimillionaire and philanthropist Abraham Winston. Winston, 68, is in critical condition at the Blumberg Burn Treatment Center in Sherman Oaks. Police have tentatively linked the assault to five others committed over the past three months, all in the same area. In each case, the victim was a transient, and all incidents have occurred between three and five A.M., when the victims were asleep on city sidewalks. All five of the previous victims died of their injuries. Winston, who reportedly suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, disappeared from his Chicago home more than a month ago. It is not known how he got to Los Angeles. “We can’t say for sure it’s the Crisper,” said LAPD spokesperson Lieutenant Alfred Brown, using the name police have given to the assailant. “All we can state at this time is that the method and the choice of victim are consistent with the Crisper’s past attacks. We’re pursuing our leads with all due alacrity.”

“ ‘Alacrity’?” I asked Eleanor.

“Keep reading,” she said.

At a press conference called immediately following the LAPD announcement, Abraham Winston’s daughter, Annabelle, denounced police inaction on the case to date. “The victims are dispossessed persons,” Miss Winston said, reading from a prepared statement. “That does not lessen the agony they experienced. If these people had lived in Bel Air or in Beverly Hills, rather than on the streets, someone would be in jail by now. Instead, five people are dead and my father will probably die within a matter of hours. I have no faith in the ability of the Los Angeles Police Department to bring the murderer to justice. Therefore, I have hired a private investigator who will report to me, and I have put the resources of Winston Enterprises at his disposal. At the least, I hope my action will goad the police into a renewed effort. At the most, I believe that the man I have hired will bring this monster to justice.”

“Where are you?” Eleanor asked.

“Something about monsters and justice. I wonder who wrote this stuff for her.”

“A PR man,” Eleanor said. “You don’t just call a press conference, you know. Somebody has to know which press to call.”

“Sweet bleeding Jesus,” I said, reading ahead.

“I was waiting for that,” Eleanor said. “Read it out loud.”

“In response to reporters’ questions, Miss Winston, who was nicknamed Baby by the media during her reign as one of America’s most prominent debutantes, identified the investigator she had retained as Simeon Grist of Topanga. Mr. Grist, thirty-seven, came to prominence several months ago in the breakup of an interstate ring that was trafficking in children for immoral purposes. Several suspects are now in custody, awaiting arraignment in that case. One of them is a former LAPD sergeant.”

“See what I mean?” Eleanor said. “Double whammy.”

“ ‘Attempts to reach Mr. Grist for comment were unsuccessful,’ ” I read. “That’s because I was out getting poisoned with Hammond. They called again this morning, though.”

“Don’t talk to them until you know what to say,” Eleanor said. “What about your answering machine?”

“I didn’t check it.”

“If you had,” Eleanor said, “you’d have known that I called to tell you that your name was on the radio last night.”

“Radio?”

“And television. And now print. Home run.”

“I haven’t got a friend in the world,” I said.

“You’ve got Baby.” Eleanor’s tone wasn’t pleasant.

“Swell. An ex-debutante with a checkbook. I feel like the last candle before the ice age.”

Eleanor sat back and regarded me as though I were a new and unpromising life-form. Jealousy hadn’t been a factor in the early stages of our relationship, but it had found its way in when I began cheating on her, for reasons I still didn’t understand. Now that we were no longer together, the jealousy remained, vestigial, like the knee-jerk reflex in an amputated leg.

Balancing my cup unsteadily in my hand, I checked the machine. I had urgent messages from channels Two, Four (twice), Five, Seven, Nine, Eleven, and Thirteen. Also CBS News in New York and six local radio stations.

“Just what every private detective wants to be,” I said. “Public.” I changed chairs and sat on a large, uncompromising lump.

“If I might suggest a policy,” Eleanor said, softening enough to lean forward. She looked good enough to spread on toast.

“Suggest until you’re blue in the face,” I said, fishing the lump out from under me. It was Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, one of the challenges I’d promised myself I’d get through in what had looked like a nice, slow summer. “I haven’t got a clue.”

“It’s a two-point policy,” she said. “First, plug your phone back in and say something boring to everyone who calls. That was Henry Kissinger’s policy. Whenever he was asked a question he didn’t want to answer, he began his reply with the words, ‘As I said yesterday,’ and everyone stopped taking notes. Just tell whoever calls that you’ve given an exclusive statement to someone else. At least it’ll get them off your tail.”

“And the second point?” I realized I was still holding Sister Carrie. It felt heavier than a broken promise, and I dropped it to the floor. It landed with the substantial thump of serious literature.

“Quit the case.” She put down her cup. Bravo’s ears went up, as they always did, at the clink of crockery.

“That’s not so easy,” I said.

“And why not? This guy could wind up burning you.”

“Abraham Winston was a good man. He didn’t deserve to be cooked on the sidewalk. And she’s right, the cops haven’t been doing all they could, or even half of all they could. It’s just a bunch of bums as far as they’re concerned. Remember the Skid Row Ripper? They never worked that one out, either.”

Eleanor gave me an eloquent Chinese shrug, a shrug with thousands of years of equivocation behind it. “So hang yourself out to dry,” she said. “There’s still point one. Plug in the phone.”

I did, and it rang. I looked at her questioningly, but she’d already gotten up to get more coffee. “Boring,” she said, over her shoulder. “Just be boring.”

I picked it up.

“Mr. Grist?” said a voice I almost recognized. “Please hold for Mr. Stillman.”

I covered the mouthpiece. “Norman Stillman,” I said in agony.

“He could be interesting,” Eleanor said without looking around. She was pouring.

I doubted that, but I hung on. I had met Stillman before. In fact, I’d worked for him, and not very happily, when one of the stars he employed had gotten himself into trouble. His company, imaginatively named Norman Stillman Productions, gave the television audience what it wanted, which is to say blood and guts and sex and sensationalism and depravity, all under the banner of family entertainment. Stillman’s sole virtue, in my eyes, was that he actually liked the shows he produced.

There was a muffled click, and Stillman came on the line. “So, Mr. Grist, you’re famous at last,” he said unctuously. It wasn’t hard to picture him in his big, fat office with nautical charts all over the walls and a big brass-and-wood wheel from a nineteenth-century sloop mounted above the desk.

“You can’t imagine how I’ve hungered for it, Norman,” I said. “It’s a dream come true.” I shrugged helplessly at Eleanor.

Stillman judiciously measured out a laugh. “Well, when I saw your name this morning, the old penny dropped.” He sounded paternal and jocular. When Norman Stillman sounded paternal and jocular, it was time to button your wallet and count your change.

“Was I in Variety!”

There was a moment of silence, during which Stillman decided to take it lightly. “I read the Times, too, Mr. Grist,” he said. “I must say, I had hoped time would have mellowed you.”

Eleanor handed me a fresh cup of coffee. “You were saying something about a penny,” I reminded him.

“A penny? Oh. Oh, yes, the famous dropping penny. Only figurative, of course. I had something considerably more substantial in mind.”

Eleanor sat down opposite me, her eyebrows raised. I waited. Stillman didn’t say anything. After a moment, I started to whistle. I’ve found it irritates the hell out of the person on the other end of the phone.

Stillman said, “A few minutes, Dierdre.” I was willing to bet that Dierdre, his long-suffering secretary, wasn’t even in the room. Then he said: “Do you know Velez Caputo?”

“Personally?” I mouthed at Eleanor, “Velez Caputo.” Eleanor made a sign in the air that looked like a backward S with two vertical strokes drawn through it.

“I wouldn’t expect you to know her personally,” Stillman said avuncularly.

“And your expectations would be correct,” I said.

“But you know who she is.”

Indeed I did. Velez Caputo was a svelte, acutely intelligent middle-thirties Chicana who helped 20 or 30 million Americans waste their afternoons five days a week. Into her viewers’ living rooms, with chronological predictability, Caputo brought an unending parade of rapists, batterers, batterees, bigamists, trigamists, transvestites, and people who enjoyed dressing as members of other species, who spent ninety minutes happily calling national attention to what should have been their deepest secrets. And Americans tuned in by the millions to see the country’s newest subculture: the proudly weird.

“I never miss Velez’s show,” I said, “unless I can help it.”

Eleanor laughed, but Stillman was beyond listening. “Velez has a concept, a brilliant concept, one that will make television history. What are the two most popular kinds of shows on the air today?”

“Norman,” I said, sipping my coffee, “how the hell would I know? The last time I watched television, Raymond Burr could still see his feet.”

“True-life crime shows and game shows,” he said promptly.

“That’s depressing.”

“So what do you think Velez’s concept is?” He liked to ask questions.

“A true-life crime game show,” I said. Eleanor held her nose. Bravo looked at her expectantly, waiting for the next move in the game.

“A true-life crime game show,” Stillman said triumphantly. “What do you think?”

“I’m speechless.”

“So do you see where I’m going?”

“To the bank, probably.” I drained the rest of my coffee and held the cup out. Eleanor poured part of hers into it.

“The format’s already in the can. Three contestants, Velez as hostess, of course, footage from some true-life crime with clues planted here and there, three suspects. One of them is the real-life crook.”

I drank the coffee and grimaced. Eleanor, despite her New Age convictions, put enough sugar in her coffee to rot a tyrannosaurus’s teeth.

“The home audience sees one or two clues the contestants don’t see, just to make them feel smart,” Stillman said rhapsodically. “The audience always has to feel smarter than the contestants,” he added, reciting the time-honored dictum of game-show producers all over the world. “The jerks should always be sitting at home slapping their foreheads and swearing over how much money they’d be winning if they were in the studio.”

“And the winner gets a date with the crook.”

“That’s what’s so brilliant,” Stillman said. “The winner gets a reward that’s posted at the beginning of the show. Remember Wanted posters?”

I looked at my watch. If I was going to quit the case, now was the time to do it. “Look,” I said, “you can’t imagine how exciting this is, being on the inside like this. It’s almost as good as having a subscription to Broadcasting. But what’s it got to do with me?”

“Advisers,” he said, a bit petulantly. “We’ll need advisers. Somebody to help us reconstruct the crime scenes, plant the clues, guide Velez in her prompts to the contestants. So whaddya say?”

“I’d say it’s a lot of work for a penny.”

“Twenty-five hundred a week,” he said.

I began to whistle again. Eleanor winced. I can’t whistle on key.

“Three if you work out,” Stillman said, a bit too hastily. “Maybe thirty-five if the show goes.”

“ If the show goes? Norman, have you got a show or not?”

“I told you,” he said, sounding huffy, “the format’s in the can, plus we’ve got Velez. Come on, it’s a certified check. There’s just a few little wrinkles to work out.”

“Like selling it?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “We still have to sell it, of course.”

I waited. He waited, too. While I was waiting, I polished the phone with my shirt. I was working on the earpiece when I realized he was talking, so I put it back to my ear.

“… only exploratory, of course, just to see if you’re interested. You’re at the top of my list.”

“Norman,” I said. “The sun is approaching its zenith. I have a beautiful woman with me. It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake. Why in God’s name are you calling?”

He put a lot of work into a manly chuckle. “That’s why I thought of you,” he said. “ ‘Sharp,’ I said, ‘the boy’s sharp.’”

“Well, now that we’ve settled that I’m sharp,” I said, “what do you really want?”

There was the kind of silence that liars loathe.

“Ah,” Stillman said reluctantly, “there was one other thing.”

“I thought there might be.”

“First,” he said.

“What do you mean, first? If there’s only one other thing, how can what you’re about to say be first?”

“See?” he said. “See why I called you? ‘Sharp,’ I said. ‘The boy’s sharp.’”

“See?” I echoed. “See how sharp I am? See why I’m going to hang up?”

“Okay, there’s two things. About this dinkus with the lighter fluid.”

“Ah. As a great man once said-Jesus, I think it might have been you, Norman-‘The old penny drops.’”

“You’ll be great on the air. Will you do Velez’s show tomorrow? It’s about the people who track serial murderers. The title is ‘In Death’s Footsteps.’ Or maybe it’s ‘Footprints.’ Whaddya think? A thousand, cash.”

“No. I’m not going on Velez’s show.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Stillman said promptly. “I told Velez you’d say that. What about two thousand?”

“No. And second?”

“Um,” he said. I visualized him shining the buttons on his nautical blazer. Norman owned a yacht solely as an excuse for his taste in clothes and interior decorators. “Has any other producer called you?”

“Norman,” I said unctuously, “is there any other producer?”

“Not who’s worth talking to.”

“So talk.”

“If you get this dinkus,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “you hold back a couple of things for me. There’s nobody who can handle this kind of thing like Norman Stillman Productions. You play ball, we’ll do ninety minutes live on network the night after the dinkus gets jugged. We already got the title.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“‘The Fire Within,’” he said obliviously. “Or something like that. Bring me the right stuff, we’re talking six figures.”

“As in three comma three figures?” Eleanor arched her eyebrows.

“You got it.”

“What’s the first figure?” I asked, just out of curiosity.

“Ahhh,” Norman Stillman said, “that’s a detail. That’s for the bookkeepers.”

“Have your bookkeeper call me,” I said.

“Hey,” Stillman said apprehensively. He was working up to something better, but I didn’t hear it because I hung up.

“Who would have thought it?” I asked. “I get hired to find someone who’s torching the homeless, and people start throwing money at me. Come on, I’ve had cases that began and ended in Beverly Hills, and no one’s ever mentioned six figures before.”

“Six figures sounds good to me,” she said. “You’ve never had this kind of media attention before, either.”

“Public television hasn’t gotten to us yet,” I said, feeling momentarily optimistic.

“It’s their pledge week,” she said. “They’re on documentaries about baby pandas and the giant sea slug. They’re concentrating on endangered species. And Yanni.”

“I’m an endangered species,” I said, taking an emotional nosedive. “I’m in danger of being put out of business.”

“You can still carry out point two. You can quit. I don’t care about the nice man who got set on fire, I care about you. That Baby or whatever her name is had no right to call a press conference without telling you she was going to do it. How do you know this crazy won’t come after you?”

“I’m not his type,” I said, with more conviction than I felt.

“It even says where you live. In Topanga. Suppose-”

“He’s been burning the homeless.”

She looked around the shack, much the worse for wear since she’d left. “You almost qualify.”

“I’ll be okay,” I said, watching her. We hadn’t been talking much lately, since she’d begun to date someone else. Jealousy worked two ways.

“Well, she shouldn’t,” Eleanor began, then stopped, catching my eyes. “She shouldn’t have held that press conference, even if she does have all the money in the world. That guy…” She trailed off. “This is complicated, you know?” she asked, looking at Bravo. “I mean, I still love you. In a way.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said. I didn’t have the courage to say anything else.

Hand in hand, something we did out of habit, we went down the driveway, as she accompanied me on the first phase of the journey that would take me to the Bel Air Hotel to tender my resignation. Bravo Corrigan trotted along next to us, sniffing professionally at the bushes, a big, longhaired, raffish canine bum. At the bottom of the driveway, I noticed something unusual for a Sunday: The red flag on the mailbox was vertical, and there was a piece of paper wedged between the hinged door of the mailbox and the mailbox proper. And with Eleanor standing behind me and looking nosily over my shoulder, I opened and read the letter from the Crisper.

“Darling,” I said, calling Eleanor something I hadn’t called her in more than a year, “all the rules just got changed.”