The Four Last Things

Chapter 14

That was what I got for not reading the papers. I'd been assuming all along that Harker's death had been reported, when obviously a clean-up squad had been waiting in the wings. For whatever reason, they'd waited until I'd cleared out and then sent in the housekeepers. And for whatever reason, I told myself again, they'd left me alive.

So, we were dealing with a number of people. At least three, I figured: one to kill Harker, probably one more to help him, as Hamlet said, to lug the guts into the neighbor room-bodies are heavy-and one to go to my house and slip the cassette out of my answering machine. One or more of them had obviously been listening in when Harker called me, and Harker had probably known it but it hadn't worried him. He'd thought he was part of the gang.

On the whole, that made me happy. The more people you have involved in a murder, the more likely it is that one of them will do something stupid.

Hollering over the music in the Red Dog, Hammond had made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, I was the stupid one. If I'd done what I was supposed to do, which is to say call the cops, they'd have a body. He'd used language that had turned Eleanor scarlet, and I'd had no choice but to listen. As we staggered out of the Red Dog and into the rain on Hollywood Boulevard, I'd asked whether our deal still stood.

Hammond didn't seem to notice the rain. He stood there, solid and bulky, with water streaming down his face, and thought for a long wet moment.

"With a difference," he finally said. "The information is two-way. I get everything you get." He really wanted out of Records.

"Al," I said, "of course. I'd assumed that all along."

"Honey," Hammond said to Eleanor, who was shivering at my side, "go home with Peppi. She's a straighter guy than your buddy here."

"He's always been a liar," she said. So much for loyalty.

"All of it, Simeon," Hammond said to me. "And I mean it. Investigators' licenses are precarious things."

I got my legs to wobbling. "Look," I said, "you're making me weak in the knees."

Hammond took Eleanor's hand in both of his. "You're a beautiful little thing," he said, "and it's been a pleasure to meet you. Good-bye, jerk," he said to me. He turned abruptly and walked away into the rain. He hardly weaved at all.

"What a sweet man," Eleanor said. "His mother is a very lucky woman."

"Well, you beautiful little thing," I said, "where to now?"

"Home. We've got a lot to do tomorrow."

We hadn't even hit the Santa Monica freeway when the man on the radio said that there'd been a mudslide in Topanga, closing the boulevard from the Pacific Coast Highway to Old Canyon.

"Well, shit," I said. "That's an extra fifty miles."

"Stay at my place," she said absently.

"You're kidding," I said. Hope springs eternal.

"Why not? The couch is comfortable."

Hope, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, is a thing with feathers, and Eleanor had just twisted its neck. For lack of anything more interesting to do, I turned the windshield wipers onto high, and they responded by swinging back and forth at exactly the same rate as before. The silence in the car lengthened in an ominous fashion. I turned right from La Brea onto the long freeway on-ramp, heading west.

"Anyway," she finally said, "if you sleep on my couch you won't be sleeping with that Roxy or whatever her name is." She rapped her fingernails sharply against the window.

I swallowed a couple of times and wondered how she knew about Roxanne Then I stopped wondering. The Women's Network, the world's most successful subversive society, had done its stuff. "Who am I supposed to sleep with?" I said, more defensively than I would have liked. "My teddy bear wore out years ago."

"Simeon," she said with elaborate unconcern, "I don't care who you sleep with, as long as you don't catch anything. I mean, I certainly hope you don't think I'm being possessive."

Childishly I sped up; Eleanor hated it when I drove fast. This time, though, she seemed determined to ignore it. She chewed distractedly on the ends of her hair and gazed out the window on her side.

"I want to interview the Speaker and her mother," she finally said, "and that Dr. Merryman you keep talking about."

"Great," I said. "And Happy Trails to you."

"Are you going to come along?"

"They know me."

"So what? They don't know you're a detective, do they?"

"No, but they know my name isn't Algernon Swinburne."

"Good thing. I was getting tired of that name anyway. I couldn't keep calling you Algy. It sounds like something that grows in a pool."

"This is dangerous, Eleanor," I said for perhaps the twelfth time. "These folks kill people."

"Why is it okay for you and not for me?" she asked with a sudden burst of energy. "Is murder something new, some passing fad? Do you think I like it when you swashbuckle around all night, like some Boy Scout fantasy, and come home with holes in your head? This is the first time since you started this stupid job that I've gotten a chance to see what it's all about. So it's dangerous. So is driving like a maniac when it's raining. Simeon, would you please slow down?"

"Then you're in this for keeps," I said.

"Oh, come on. Stop playing Lochinvar. I don't want to get rescued. There's a story here. It could make a big difference in my life. The New Age is getting old. Are you going to slow down or not?"

I eased my foot from the accelerator. "One of the Speakers is dead," I said. "Let's try to locate the one who isn't. She couldn't be more than seventeen by now."

"What's her name?"

I didn't know, and it made me feel dumb. "Get it from Chantra," I said. "If she doesn't have it, we'll go downtown to that hotel the Church owns and pick up some literature. And where is Mr. Ellspeth? The current Speaker must have a father, but the Church only books mother-daughter acts."

"Why is he important?"

"I don't know that he is. But maybe he's on the outside wishing he were in. If so, he could be resentful enough to talk to us."

"Like Wilburforce," she said.

"Like Wilburforce. Go into the morgue at the Times, if you can do it without having to explain what you're doing to too many people. Can you?"

"I don't know. I've never looked in the morgue before. I've only worked for them a little while. Morgue," she said. "What an awful word. What am I supposed to be looking for?"

"Anything you can find on the Church. Or on the Congregation. Look for stories on the death of a girl named Anna Klein."

"Why and when?"

"She was the Church's first Speaker. I don't know when, but it had to be within the last seven or eight years. The Church is only twelve years old."

"The one who died, right? Some kind of accident?"

"Maybe," I said. The wipers made another slow pass. "And then again, maybe not."

"Another one?"

"Could be."

"Holy smoke," Eleanor said. "She was just a little girl. Who'd want to kill a little girl? I know this sounds gruesome, Simeon, but there could be a mini-series here."

"Sooner or later," I said, "there could also be a man with a gun in his hand. As your friend Peppi said, this isn't television."

"Why do you assume it's a man?"

"Good point," I said grudgingly. "The Church is riddled with women."

"That's a pleasant way to put it. But you're probably right. The bigwigs all seem to be men."

"It was ever thus."

A big-rig, a twelve-wheeler at least, howled past us on the left, throwing off sheets of water from its tires. The light in the cab was on, and I watched in fascination as the driver tossed back a couple of pills.

"Anything else?" she said.

"Yeah. Hold off on Merryman and Angel for the moment, if you don't mind. Let's talk to the people who don't know me first, okay? A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it's also the place where you're most likely to walk into an ambush."

"You're so masculine," she said. It didn't sound like a compliment.

"Then why do I have to sleep on the couch?"

"Because it would complicate things. We've got days of talking to do before we sleep together again, if we ever do. Anyway, you've always got Roxy."

"Roxanne," I said. "You know her name, so why pretend to get it wrong?"

"Little heavier than you usually like them, isn't she?"

"It doesn't matter," I said offensively. "I'm usually on top."

"That must be novel," she said.

There was no way to win.

At her place, she waited for a moment for the rain to subside. When it didn't, she opened the passenger door anyway. "You're not coming in?"

"For what?"

"Okay," she said. "See you tomorrow." There was a moment of silence. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Don't be a lunk," she said. "Anyway, you've got a long drive." The instant she got out of the car, the rain stopped. It started again as she closed the front door behind her.

To get from Santa Monica to Topanga Canyon without going up the Pacific Coast Highway you have to track east, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, and then head north until you can pick up Topanga, turn left, and go most of the way west again. It's a meandering, basically U-shaped route, all freeways and blue-white light at night, a charmless drive under the best of circumstances. In a downpour, it always reminds me of Shelly Berman's famous definition of flying: hours of boredom relieved by moments of stark terror.

Between the yawns and the occasional red accident flares, I thought about Eleanor. We'd met at UCLA, where I was pursuing one of my long string of semi-useless degrees in lieu of doing anything better. She was the most wastefully beautiful human being I'd ever seen in my life, attractive way beyond the demands of natural selection. Two weeks after she moved in she had me kicking a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit that I'd thought was as permanent as a tattoo. A week later, to my infinite surprise, I was running along next to her on San Vicente Boulevard: wheezy, labored quarter-miles at first, then miles, then l0K's, finally marathons.

In spite of the fact that she couldn't get me to stop drinking beer, the pounds began to fall away. I'd been a shamefaced, sedentary 237 pounds when we met; six months later I weighed 175, and I was stopping to look for my reflection in store windows on Westwood Boulevard. It wasn't vanity; I just couldn't find myself. Until I learned to recognize my new silhouette, I'd had an eerie feeling that I was invisible on the street.

My blood pressure, which had been higher than the federal deficit, plummeted to textbook normal and stayed there. Several cups of nicotine-based goop gradually cleared from my lungs. I no longer woke up each morning to the sound of my respiratory system squeaking.

And then a cocaine-fried subhuman made a natural mistake, considering the state of his consciousness, and threw an inoffensive young woman named Jennie Chu off the top of one of the UCLA dormitories. Jennie Chu had been one of Eleanor's closest friends, a shy math student, gymnast, and part-time classical pianist from Taiwan who had never really mastered American English and who'd had the misfortune to wear eyeglasses that resembled those worn by the woman the coke freak had really intended to kill. The doctors said she had died instantly, but, as Eleanor said at the time, "What's instantly? It must have taken her a month to hit the ground."

A few days later I delivered the man who killed Jennie Chu to the LAPD with both his elbows broken, and I had found a career. I had learned that I enjoyed righting wrongs. I had also learned that, under the right circumstances, I enjoyed breaking someone's elbows. I'd been keeping tabs on the latter discovery in the two years since. I'd broken a couple of hands, hands that belonged to a man who'd come up with an interesting new use for pliers, but no elbows.

Topanga Canyon Boulevard stretched uphill in front of me, empty and wet. As empty, I thought, with several drams of self-pity, as the house I lived in, the house I'd shared with Eleanor until I'd fooled around one too many times and she'd stopped telling me it was okay and packed up and moved to Venice.

It's so easy to break things that it seems like it should be easier to put them back together. Once, when I was a kid, I was showing one of my mother's prize Irish crystal vases to a pretty classmate, feeding her wide-eyed awe by making up stories about the craftsmen who cut every facet by hand and died prematurely from inhaling glass. In my eagerness to get to the punch line, I dropped the vase. It broke into only three pieces, but I spent the entire afternoon sitting on the floor with a tube of glue, and the cracks were the first thing my mother saw when she got home that evening. The lesson didn't take. I'd broken a lot of things since.

Alice sputtered resentfully when I cut the engine at the bottom of the driveway. The rain drummed giant fingers on the thin Detroit tin of Alice's roof. It was like sitting in a big beer can.

Rain stopped for Eleanor, but I was too much of a realist to expect it to stop for me. I opened the door and hunched over, reducing the surface area vulnerable to the wet.

The smell hit me even before I got out of the car. It rolled at me out of the sagebrush, a concentration of corruption so vile that it should have been incandescent, like swamp gas. Its source, whatever it was, was dead beyond the resurrection dreams of even the most fervent born-again Christian. I forgot the rain altogether and clawed my way up the muddy driveway. At the top of the hill I realized that I'd been holding my breath and drew several shuddering breaths of clean, rainwashed air. Against my better judgment I raised my arm to my nose and sniffed my sleeve. The smell had impregnated the cloth.

Then I noticed that the kitchen light was on.

I hadn't left it on.

One of the design quirks of the shack I rent from Mrs. Yount is that there are absolutely no windows you can look through from the outside. They're all about eight feet above ground level. That's charming when you want privacy, which I usually did. Now, standing in the downpour, I considered the drawbacks. The one that immediately occurred to me was sudden death.

The house is heated by a wood-burning stove, and a wood-burning stove requires a woodpile. I went to the woodpile and selected a sodden piece of oak, about the length of my arm and just slender enough to wrap my hand around. The rain had become an ally: it muffled the sound of my approach. Even the sucking sounds I made as I pulled my shoes out of the mud were probably inaudible to anyone inside.

A foot at a time, I reached the door. I stood in front of it for what seemed like an hour. Just as I was about to convince myself that I had left the kitchen light on, I heard footsteps on the wooden floor inside. A shadow passed in front of the opaque glass in the door, heading for the kitchen.

I hefted the wood in my hand to make sure I had the balance right, and waited. Footsteps again. The shadow passed across the door again, and I threw myself against it and lurched across the threshold, the piece of wood lifted high above my head.

Roxanne, wearing my heavy woolen bathrobe, whirled and shrieked like the heroine in a forties horror flick. Then she registered who I was, lowered her hand from her mouth, and said, "Simeon, how nice. You've brought in some firewood."

Half an hour later, with wine warming our insides and wet wood sputtering in the stove, we fell asleep.

I woke up even more reluctantly than usual and stumbled to the bathroom. Roxanne, once again, was long gone, but the smell of coffee permeated the house. The rain had apparently stopped, and sun streamed improbably through the windows.

Since hot water in Topanga takes approximately the same time to arrive as the Ice Age did in Europe, I turned the shower on and snapped the door shut before I took a stance at the washbasin to scrape what tasted like several past lifetimes off my teeth. My toothbrush seemed too heavy to lift. When I looked at my face in the mirror, rabid foam dripped from my chin. I couldn't bear to look at myself, so I shaved from memory and stepped into the shower.

The water was exactly body temperature. Uncannily body temperature. Feeling vaguely uneasy, I began to scrub. I looked down and saw the streams running off my body turning a brownish-red rust color. Then the water stopped altogether and I looked up.

Blood gouted out through the shower head. Dark, thick, precisely body temperature, it poured forth, splashing off my shoulders and splattering the shower tiles in crimson Rorschach patterns. I leapt back, and it squished beneath my bare feet.

I heard my scream echo wildly. I tried to push the shower door open. It was stuck. I threw a shoulder, streaming with blood, against it. Nothing.

Someone was outside, holding it closed.

I hammered against it. It didn't give. The blood stopped flowing. Against all my better judgment I looked to see why. White worms, thin, pallid, not really white but a sickly pale gray, squeezed themselves through the holes in the shower head and began to dangle down toward me. I grabbed at the edge of the shower door and hurled myself into it. It opened an inch and then slammed shut again and I found myself looking down, staring transfixed at what had caught in the door.

Long blond hair.

Angel Ellspeth's hair.

The worms touched my shoulder.

The odor of death filled the shower.

The worms grasped me more tightly, their gaping mouths opening wide, gripping my shoulder, pulling me up, up toward the shower head.

"Simeon," they said in a girlish voice.

I tried to shake myself free. They hung fast. I closed my eyes.

"Simeon," they said. "Something stinks."

I opened my eyes, swallowed, and looked at Roxanne.

"It's really bad," she said, looking down at me. She was wrapped in my robe. "Are you awake, or what?"

"I'm awake," I said. I was also sweating. "What in God's name is it?"

"Well," she said in the gray light of a rainy morning, "I'm no expert, but my guess is that something's dead."