Incinerator

8

“He’s a tall, thin blond man with a clubfoot, and he drives a gray Mazda and wears a black rubber trench coat,” I said. “He can’t be that hard to find.”

Pasty beneath the humming fluorescents, Hammond and Dr. Schultz regarded me skeptically. I’d insisted that I report to Hammond, partly to give him something to do and partly because it was nice to be in a position where I could insist on something, and I didn’t want to waste it. As a trade, Captain Finch had insisted that Dr. Schultz be present whenever I did. Willick, who was apparently connected to Hammond by an invisible silken cord, sat fatly at the foot of the table, taking notes.

“Who’s your source?” Dr. Schultz asked through a cloud of smoke. He was leaning back, his chair tilted on its rear legs, the picture of manicured ease. The cigarette in his hand, his third in fifteen minutes, was a Dunhill. I might have known.

“For what?”

“Rubber,” he said to the cigarette. “The supposition that the trench coat is made of rubber. Hermione told you everything else.”

Hammond fidgeted.

“Skip it,” I said. “She doesn’t want to talk to the police. And, by the way, Al,” I added nastily, “thanks.” I knew that Hermione hadn’t told anyone but me about the limp. She’d been saving it to get out of the jug. Was Hammond my friend, or just another cop?

“Procedure,” Hammond said automatically. He didn’t meet my eyes, though.

Dr. Schultz clenched his teeth together in a way that made his jaw muscles bulge. His eyes were smaller than caviar. I tried not to look too terrified. Hammond looked as reasonable as it was possible for Hammond to look. Willick made scratching noises. “This is a cooperative investigation,” Schultz said.

“Who’s cooperating with me?” I asked Hammond.

“You’ve had everything we’ve got,” Dr. Schultz said. “There’s no reason to be hostile.”

“Then may I have your address and phone number?” I asked him.

“For what?” he asked, streaming smoke, blue under the lights, through his nostrils.

“For the next press conference.”

He tilted back a little farther in his chair and then had to catch a foot under the table to keep from going over the rest of the way. The foot made a hollow thunk on the underside of the table, and Schultz had a coughing fit. He hunched over, hacking into his cupped hands. “Of course not,” he said when he’d finished. “Do you think I’m crazy?” He glanced at Willick as though to reassure himself that there was at least one person in the room who hadn’t seen him lose his balance. Willick, was staring at him, his mouth open.

“Then don’t tell me there’s no reason for me to be hostile,” I said. “He knows where I live, and I doubt very much that you’re giving me everything you’ve got.”

“Then how can we verify it?” He gave me the amber smile again. He saw me staring at the pack of Dunhills, positioned on the table like a Chinese household god, and picked it up and extended it to me with a generous confidence of a born skinflint who knows that his offer will be rejected. I reached out and took the pack.

“Thanks,” I said. “I can’t usually afford these.”

He kept the smile in place. He was being very professional, very doctoral. Just one Ph. D. to another. “I ask you,” he said, “how can we verify it?”

“You can verify it by your common sense,” I said. “It was rubber because rubber isn’t permeable. Rubber keeps the gasoline from getting on his clothes. He gets home, he hoses off the coat, and he’s as pure as the Madonna. The one in the paintings, not the one who sings songs in a girdle.”

“That’s no girdle,” Hammond said. “That dame don’t need no girdle.” Willick looked surprised at the fact that Hammond had heard of Madonna. I was surprised, too: So much for my theory about cops and popular songs.

“And who was the source?” Schultz asked again, putting out the filter of his cigarette and stealing another glance at the pack in my hand. He was sitting straight in his chair now. He only lounged when he was working on his emphysema.

“No one you’ll ever meet,” I said.

“I’m not sure that’s wise,” Schultz said, making a note.

I got mad. Maybe it was the note. “So tell me how wise it was to sit there dreaming up elaborate theories about why the Incinerator was hitting people at the bottom of the social ladder. I believe that was your phrase?”

“It was,” Schultz said. He tried the smile on me, without much success.

“Have you ever burned anyone to death, Dr. Schultz?”

As a man with credentials, he frowned. “Of course not.”

“He chooses them because they hold still,” I said. “You’re a psychologist. Why haven’t you asked why he uses wooden matches? Why not switch to a Bic or something so he doesn’t have to stand there breaking matches until one finally lights? He lights fire to the homeless because they’re anesthetized, because they’re dead to the world, because they give him time. He needs time partly because he’s using wooden matches.”

Hammond said something that sounded like “whuff.” Dr. Schultz, with the expertise that comes with years of being on the profitable end of psychoanalysis, said, “Interesting,” and changed the subject. “Have you figured out where he knows you from?”

“No,” I said.

“My guess,” Schultz said, closing his eyes to prove how hard he was thinking, “is college.”

It sounded like a good guess, and it was one I’d already made myself, but I was still aggravated that Hammond had told him everything that happened in Hermoine’s cell. “I was in college most of my adult life,” I said. “I’ll work on that if you’ll work on this: Why does he stick with wooden matches?” I twisted the cigarette pack into a crumpled spiral by way of emphasis. “Golly,” I said, dropping it. “Oops.”

Dr. Schultz finally managed to display his awful teeth. “Maybe you’ll eventually tell us,” he said. He smiled again, an expression with no more affection behind it than a misdirected Valentine, and reached out to take the crumpled pack. With small, precise gestures, he began to smooth it out. When it was almost rectangular, he opened it and tugged one into the light. It was broken. So was the next. He pulled out a third.

“Willick,” Dr. Schultz said, “have you got any Scotch tape?”

Eleanor and I had determined several days earlier that it was time to move Hammond into group therapy. Sitting there, I regretted the decision.

“He didn’t quit the case?” Eleanor asked Hammond, sounding disbelieving.

“He couldn’t,” Hammond said. His beefy growl undercut the silvery clink of silverware against fine china and the discreet Vivaldi piccolo concerto that recycled endlessly through the speakers mounted on the silk-covered walls. We were spending Baby’s money in a Brentwood restaurant frequented by people whose faces you usually saw in only two dimensions and four-color printing.

“And why not?” Eleanor asked. She was all in black, and she looked like the whitest woman in the world. She regarded her salad doubtfully, as though it were something that had sprouted on her plate.

“Honey,” Hammond said, patting her wrist. He was the only man in the world who could have called Eleanor “honey” and lived. “He’s stuck.”

“Any word from Hazel, Al?” I asked to change the subject momentarily. I had a lot to say to him, but I wanted to wait for the right moment.

“I heard from her lawyers,” he said. “Fifty percent of the world.” His tone turned that avenue of conversation into a dead end. He hadn’t drunk enough for the therapy to begin. Anyway, I’d just decided there wasn’t going to be any therapy tonight.

“Lawyers are the utensils people use to eat each other with,” I said, poking through my own salad. “No bandanna tonight, Al?”

“What’s a bandanna?” Hammond asked, the picture of innocence.

I skipped the idea of waiting for the right moment. “It’s a hat worn by somebody who wants to prove he’s stupid,” I said, leaning forward so quickly that my plate skidded away from me. Eleanor forgot she was mad and stared at me. “Like you, you bluecoated Kim Philby.”

“Who’s she?” Hammond asked, looking almost nervous. “Kim Novak I know.”

The headwaiter, who had been hovering over us, cleared his throat and looked down at my plate, which was teetering on the edge of the table. “Something is wrong?”

“Radicchio,” I said. “Major allergy. It could kill me.”

He made a clucking sound. They must teach it at the Culinary Institute of America. I’d heard it all over the map. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Something else, then?”

“This,” I said, handing him the plate to get rid of him. “Just pick out the radicchio.”

“Simeon,” Eleanor said, with a spot of color on each cheek. She hated scenes.

“And chop-chop,” I said. The headwaiter gave me a ghastly smile and retreated toward the kitchen. I even had Hammond’s attention.

“We have ground rules to get straight,” I said. “I’m contagious, and you’re not helping, Al.”

“You’re stuck,” Hammond said once more. “Ignore this boor, Eleanor. Eat your salad.”

Eleanor looked speculatively at me, consulting her bullshit-detector.

“No fooling,” I said to her. “You were the first one to spot it. This could be fatal. And not just for me.”

Hammond sat there, his eyes very small, looking like the Hammond I’d first met, back when I was seeking a police contact. If there had been ground to paw, he would have pawed it.

“Your impressive Dr. Schultz,” I said to Hammond, “thinks that the Incinerator knows me, remember? Thinks he’ s fixated on me. Even if he’s wrong, which I don’t think he is, the nutcase knows where I live. He’s delivered letters to me. How hard would it be for him to find out about Eleanor, too? How hard is it to believe that he’s out there, right now, watching this restaurant because he followed me here?”

“He’s not following you,” Hammond said in the tone of a fundamentalist confronted unexpectedly by a fossil. “He couldn’t take the chance.”

“Al,” I said, leaning across the table and grasping his forearm, “this one is crazy. He thinks he’s a god. For all we know, he’s sitting right out there on the other side of Twenty-sixth Street, waiting to crank up his Mazda and follow one of us home.” Hammond and Eleanor looked at each other. “And, Al, he already knows where I live. He’s not going to follow me. That leaves two, right?” Hammond sat back very heavily.

“He doesn’t burn women.” He glanced involuntarily at Eleanor.

“Not yet,” I said.

The headwaiter put my salad, much reduced, on the table in front of me with a badly suppressed sniff. “No radicchio, sir,” he said.

“Says you,” I said. “Take it away.” I thought he was going to bite me, but instead he picked up the plate and left, walking like a gymnast on the balance beam.

“Okay, Simeon,” Eleanor said when he’d gone, “you’ve been very impressive. Now what’s the point?”

“It’s just like you said yesterday,” I said, drinking some of the vault-quality Margaux she’d chosen when I’d told them the evening was on Baby. “There are two points. The first point is that I’m off-limits. Either of you wants to meet me, the first thing you do is call. We set something up, something that involves me doing everything I can possibly do to avoid a tail. Nobody comes to my house, not ever. Yesterday was the last time, until this is over.” She nodded, although a tiny twitch in her eye said that she was dying to argue with me.

“If anybody at Parker Center needs to talk to me,” I told Hammond, “it has to be set up far enough ahead of time so I’ve got the hours it takes to get from one place to another without this pyromaniac being able to follow me there. Better yet, we never meet at Parker Center. We set a meeting place that he wouldn’t suspect, a shopping mall or a motel or some damn thing, and all the cops get there fifteen minutes before I do, so he can’t possibly see them arrive if he’s following me, and they leave an hour before I do. And someone is positioned to watch my back from the moment I arrive at the location until I’m out of sight. And if it’s a motel, the cop should be a woman.”

“Why do they leave earlier?” Eleanor asked, ignoring the last remark. “Instead of after?”

“Because if I leave first, he may wait for whoever comes through the door next and follow him instead of me, and if he follows him back to Parker Center, I’m fuel. I’ve had many ambitions in life, but none of them was to be fuel.”

Eleanor wrapped her arms tightly around herself, digesting it.

“What’s point two?” Hammond asked.

“Point two,” I said, “is that the jerk I’ve chosen for my contact, since I’m stuck with this suicidal job, keeps his big fat mouth shut.”

As Hammond seethed, a new waiter-the headwaiter was keeping a sullen distance-put the main courses onto the tabletop with reproachful thunks, loud enough to make other diners stare at us.

“Al,” I said, as the waiter huffed toward the bar, “there is no margin for bullshit here. You’re a leak.”

Hammond recoiled, knocking over his drink but recovering it before most of it spilled. “A leak ” he said, outraged, “to the cops! ”

“Exactly. You don’t tell me what you’ve told them, you’re a leak, pure and simple. I’m the end of the thread, remember, Al? I said it to Baby Winston, and I’ll say it to you. If there’s a fuckup, I want it to be my fuckup. I’m dangling out there, and maybe you are and maybe Eleanor is, and Eleanor means more to me than you and I do put together. I have to know who’s involved, and I have to know what they’re doing. I don’t want somebody like Willick, or somebody even remotely like Willick, moving on his own without me knowing everything, and I mean absolutely everything, every detail and every stitch in the pattern, out front. If you’re not happy with that, let me know, and Baby and Bobby Grant can hold their press conference and everybody can go home and see what happens. Me, I’ll move into a Holiday Inn until it’s over.”

Hammond gazed regretfully at the tiny splash of spilled wine and calculated the odds in his head. When he’d finished, he looked up at me like the Hammond I’d grown to know, a fundamentally good man whose brutal and brutalizing job had cost him his family. “Just tell me what you want,” he said.

I pushed my main course aside, and silverware clattered. Eleanor had already floated hers out into the center of the table. “I want to know that you understand that when I tell you something it’s because I need your brains, not because I want it passed on to a bunch of strangers. I’m not willing to trust my life, or Eleanor’s life, or even your life, to people I don’t know. I’ll tell you what I want passed on and what I don’t. And if you tell me everything your guys get, I’ll tell you everything I get. Otherwise, I’m in a Holiday Inn, someplace like Denver or Des Moines, until you catch him.”

“You won’t like Des Moines,” Eleanor said as the headwaiter hovered, looking down at our neglected entrees.

“Then we’ll go to Thailand,” I said. “I’ve got five thousand dollars in my pocket. We’ll leave on different flights, you first by a couple of days, both of us going someplace else, and after I check every single passenger on my first flight and make sure he’s not on my second one, we’ll meet up in Seoul, and then we’ll check all the passengers again and go to Thailand and wait for Willick to catch the Incinerator. Then we’ll come home.”

“Not so fast,” Eleanor said. She looked up at the headwaiter and said, “Do you mind? ” He stepped backward suddenly, bumping into the table behind him. “Simeon,” she said as the headwaiter apologized to two anorexics who were picking at their salads, possibly seeking the deadly radicchio, “we’ve got our own problems to work out. Also, I’ve got a book contract to fulfill.”

“It’s a lot less pressing than the possibility of burning to death,” I said.

“True,” she said. “But there’s Burt.”

Burt was the publisher, an inexhaustible optimist who had pronounced her upcoming book, Eastern Roots, based on her recent visit with her own extended family in China, a Really, Really Important Book. More important even, in the Universal Scheme of Things, than her last, The Right-Brain Cookbook, a collection of recipes that were supposed to enhance creativity. I had my own opinion of both the book and its publisher. My opinion of the book was based on the fact that its inspiration had been a sarcastic remark I’d made about the old belief that some foods were supposed to be brain food, and wasn’t that a pregnant topic for the New Age? She’d taken me up on it. My opinion hadn’t been changed by the sales, which were, as they say, brisk.

My opinion about Burt was more complex. “Burt’s a nit,” I said. “He wears imitation everything. Imitation Gucci, imitation Armani, an imitation Rolex. He’s got an imitation smile, and his vocabulary is an imitation of Norman Vincent Peale. Even his hair is an imitation, for Christ’s sake. It looks like something that a misguided housewife would put on the lid of a toilet seat.”

Eleanor was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

“Except that it isn’t pink,” I added. “I’ve seen better rugs for sale on the sidewalk. In bad neighborhoods.”

“What he thinks about me is real,” Eleanor said stubbornly, “which is more than I could say for some.”

Hammond looked from her to me and got up. “Pit stop,” he said tactfully.

“Have a lube job while you’re at it,” I said. “This could take a while.”

Eleanor regarded me steadily as Hammond headed for the John.

“So much for Thailand,” I said.

“You don’t have to like him,” Eleanor said. “I think we’re past the point where you have to like him.”

“As someone who’s halfway to being a guru, you should know more about male psychology.”

She looked out the window, and I wondered who might be looking back in. “It’s supposed to be a surprise that you’re possessive?”

“Oh, bull’s-eye,” I said nastily. “And you don’t go all white around the mouth every time Baby Winston’s name comes up, do you?”

She turned back to look at me. “Are you sleeping with her?”

“It’s not just possessiveness,” I said. “A large part of my self-esteem is anchored in the fact that you fell in love with me. How am I supposed to feel when you fall in love with this bedbug, a guy who couldn’t tell an ounce of iron pyrite from the Lost Dutchman’s mine?” I wasn’t whispering, and the headwaiter was glaring at us.

“How are you supposed to feel about yourself, or how are you supposed to feel about me?” Eleanor demanded. “Disregarding your insults about Burt, it usually seems to come down to yourself, Simeon.”

I took a breath and used it. “About both of us. It works both ways. I guess one of the reasons I love you is that you had the good taste to fall in love with me.”

Eleanor laughed, then stopped abruptly. “I can’t have you,” she said. “Or, at least, you can’t seem to have just me. There always have to be a bunch of other females on the fringes. What am I supposed to be, a quasi-widow? Sleeping in a virginal bed and going on alternate Sundays to clip the grass around the gravestone, while you’re still alive and kicking everybody in sight? You haven’t got any right to ask that.”

I pushed my luck. It’s a life-long habit. “Are you sleeping with him?”

She looked away. “I just asked you the same question, except for the pronoun at the end of it. You answer me, I’ll answer you.”

“No,” I said, with all the force of the righteous.

She picked up her glass and took a ladylike sip. “Yes,” she said.

It was a little bit like being kicked in the stomach, and picking up a glass seemed like a very good idea. I picked up mine and polished it off and then picked up Hammond’s. Eleanor put her hand over mine to keep it on the table. Somebody behind me whispered.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “He’s a very nice man. What good is that?”

“It’s better than listening,” I said. I shrugged her hand free and knocked back Hammond’s drink. I’d been expecting this, but not just yet.

“You never want to listen,” she said. “That’s why our talks never work out. You never want to listen. You only want to talk.”

“I don’t get surprises when I’m talking,” I said. “I know how it’ll come out.”

“You know how you want it to come out. But what about me? What about how I want it to come out?”

“Well,” I said, “that’s up to you and Burt now, isn’t it?” I hoisted Hammond’s empty glass. “Here’s to two-way conversations,” I said. “May you have many of them.” I poured some more wine, feeling the alcohol hit the complicated traffic pattern of my central nervous system and turn it into gridlock.

“He’s not like you,” Eleanor said earnestly.

“No kidding. Are his teeth real?”

“Get off it,” she said. “I’m an adult female with adult needs. These aren’t your precious Victorian times. Trollope and Dickens are dead. We’re not supposed to turn our heads, grit our teeth, and bear it just to keep the species going. Yikes, Simeon, what am I supposed to do? Haven’t you heard from Freud?”

“Just today,” I said. “Has he found your G-spot?” The headwaiter, six feet away, cringed.

“My G-spot is in Delaware,” she said, her jaw tight.

“Buy him a plane ticket,” I said.

“He’s afraid of flying,” she said.

I started to laugh. I always laugh at the wrong time. After a moment, Eleanor laughed, too.

“You kids have made up, huh?” Hammond said, dropping a heavy hand onto each of our shoulders.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “We’ve made our beds and decided to lie in them. You been lubed?”

“I’ve had my fucking tires aligned,” he said loudly, sitting down and looking at the table. “Where are the drinks?”

“Coming up,” I said, pouring. “Eleanor drank yours.”

Hammond made a fist and put it under my chin. “This is for you if you made her need it,” he said genially.

“I’m no longer the one who can make Eleanor need anything,” I said. “The torch has been passed.”

“And you passed it,” Eleanor said. “And never, ever, say that I wanted you to.”

The headwaiter cleared his throat assertively. “The entrees are not acceptable?” he asked. If his life had depended upon it, he couldn’t have kept his upper lip down. It had a life of its own, and its life depended on heading north.

“Are the entrees acceptable?” I asked Hammond. “Perhaps we’d like them flambe?”

“We don’t do flambe,” the headwaiter said, losing control of his upper lip entirely. It flapped upward like a beached flounder. Flambe was yesterday’s culinary news.

“No flambe,” I said. “Gosh, too bad. You two still hungry?” I asked Hammond and Eleanor. They both shook their heads. “Check, please,” I said. The headwaiter, nearing the part of the Dining Experience during which the Tip usually appeared, mastered his upper lip long enough to smile and headed upwind, away from us.

“You two leave,” I said. “The drill begins now.”

“He’s not following you yet,” Hammond insisted, putting down his wineglass.

“The odds against getting AIDS in the course of normal heterosexual contact are about four thousand to one,” I said, looking not at Hammond but at Eleanor. “Fooling around much?” I asked him.

Eleanor got up. “Good night,” she said. She headed for the door.

“That’s one down,” I said.

“You don’t know shit about women,” Hammond said, watching her go. “You know that? Piss her off and send her home into the arms of that clown with the bad toupee.”

“Better him than the Incinerator,” I said. “When are you leaving, Al?”

“Give this fish a good tip,” Hammond said, rising. “You put him into a new life-insurance category. Well, ‘night.”

“Night yourself,” I said. “Half, huh?”

“And the house,” he said. “Women don’t fight fair. She’ll get the kids. Kids aren’t community property. They’re all that matters, but they’re not community property.” People were looking at us again. Hammond glared around the room, and people suddenly found something very interesting on their plates.

“Kids need houses,” I said.

“They need fathers, too,” Hammond said defiantly. “What do they need more, fathers or houses?”

“Al,” I said to the room at large, “don’t ask me. My former girlfriend is sleeping with a publisher.” The few brave ones who had looked up dived back into their plates.

“Yeah,” Hammond said. “So we’ll all sleep on it.” He picked up a knife and made fencing motions in my direction, to the genteel embarrassment of all in sight.“ ‘Bye,” he said, dropping the knife onto the table.

“ ‘Bye,” I said. He wove his way to the door, heading for the car that would take him to his empty house. People watched him go, an extravagantly overmuscled man in a tight suit.

“Thank you so much,” the headwaiter said, dropping the check onto the table as though it were a leper’s shirt. “And please come back.”

“If I do,” I said, handing him a hundred and ninety bucks, “you could get a terrific chance to learn about flambe.”