The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  At six-twenty the neon came on above me with a sudden snap of pink light and an electric buzz. A fuchsia bear holding a candle in its right paw trotted blissfully toward the sack. Neon being what it is, he was going to walk all night.

  The evening bloomed damp and unpromising before me. I reproached myself for not having the courage to complain to Mrs. Yount about the leak in my living room ceiling and hoped briefly that Ambrose Harker's roof was leaking directly above his bed. Resignedly I turned on the radio and fiddled with the knobs. Sally Oldfield's cab was obviously sitting in rush-hour traffic somewhere, its driver swearing at the rain.

  At six-forty-five I began to get nervous. The doors of the Sleepy Bear had been slapping open and closed at the bidding of cheerful adulterers like the stage set in a French bedroom farce, but the door to room 207 remained shut. She hadn't even lifted the curtain on the front window to look for her cab.

  Then the pink light became redder and the cops arrived. They went straight to room 207. There were a lot of them.

  Discretion is almost always the better part of valor. I locked Alice and went across the street to my phone booth. There was no bum in it, but it stank of urine and the floor was littered with crumpled balls that had been ripped from the Yellow Pages to meet needs more elemental than finding the nearest interior decorator. I was still standing there, breathing in Hollywood's heady perfume, an hour and a half later when two uniformed patrolmen wheeled Sally Oldfield out feetfirst. A white sheet covered her face.

  Chapter 4

  There was no answer. That made nine times, five from various phone booths and four from my living room, where water was dripping from the leak in the ceiling and the wood-burning stove was consuming oak and cedar at a rate guaranteed to chase away the chill about half an hour after I climbed shivering into a clammy bed. Right after I fell asleep the bedroom would warm up. By the time I woke up again it would have been cold for an hour.

  Sarah Marie Theresa Oldfield had been cold for more than four hours. I hung up.

  “It's a work number,” Roxanne said from the couch. She was wearing the only bathrobe I had. It looked warm. “He wouldn't be at work now. You said so yourself.”

  “I'm no authority,” I said. “The last time I was right about anything, Wendell Willkie was president.”

  She squinted at the red wine in her glass and fluffed through her memory for anything that made sense. “Wendell Willkie was never president.”

  “Right,” I said. “But isn't it a great name?”

  “Millard Fillmore,” she said, draining her glass and holding it out to me. “That's a great name. Sounds like a cross between a duck and a dance hall.”

  “I'm going to try Information,” I said.

  “Real detectives, which is to say the detectives in books, never use Information. They use intuition, they use connections downtown, they use informants in corner pool parlors. But they never use Information.”

  A minute later we both knew why. “He's not listed,” I said.

  “Nobody in L.A. is listed. I'm not listed, you're not listed.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “But your address isn't. S. Grist, it says. Address nowhere. Your first name could be Susan. You live wherever the phone rings. Not very helpful to a girl in a hurry.”

  “She's dead,” I said. “She's not in a hurry.”

  “I'm alive,” she said, “and I'd like some more wine. If I hold this glass out any longer I'll get pins and needles.”

  I poured without saying anything. I was remembering Sally Oldfield, holding the man's hand in hers as she hurried upstairs to the room he planned to kill her in. I was remembering the Chicana hooker, the tracks on her arms. I was counting my options, comparing them with theirs, and coming up sorry. It must have showed.

  “Hey,” Roxanne said. “She's not going to care if you drink. You can't bring her back to life by joining the Temperance League, if there's still such a thing. There's a big woolly bathrobe over here and I've already warmed it up.”

  The world spun once or twice and then steadied itself, and she was right. Roxanne was on the couch, all milky and smooth, holding the bathrobe open so I could crawl in. She had four beautiful little moles, a sort of dermatological Little Dipper, just above her navel. Rain spattered single-mindedly on the roof. Sally Oldfield was on a slab somewhere, offering her secrets to the forensic team. The Chicana was probably shivering at an intersection, selling her secrets to make the money the body shop would charge for the Cadillac. Outside was there and inside was here. That was the reason people went inside.

  “Roxanne,” I said, “the world is something you scrape off your shoe.”

  “That's why there's religion,” she said. “To teach you the difference between your sole and your soul.”

  I lifted the bottle and drank from it. The wine had the good, dusty taste of sunshine and Italian dirt. I held it out to her and she shook her head, hair falling around her face. Her glass was on the table in front of her.

  “Come to mama,” Roxanne said. The robe was still open.

  An hour later we were asleep, curled into a tight, chaste knot against the damp. Twice during the night I woke up, thinking the phone was ringing. It wasn't.

  Roxanne was gone when I woke up. Adding to her already overwhelming total of karmic points, she'd made a pot of coffee. Clutching a cup for dear life, I went outside. The root garden, the sparse little plot where I grow my radishes, onions, garlic, and potatoes, was thriving. This time of year neither of us needed water. Not that I ever did.

  Eight-thirty. The music business lurches foggily into gear sometime in the digestive interval between brunch and lunch. I tried Harker's number anyway; maybe corporate cops got in early so they could snoop through the secretaries' desks, looking for evidence of embezzlement or back issues of Playgirl. I got the same old lonely ring, the sound of a telephone in an empty room.

  Well, no one could say I hadn't tried. I'd thought that the death of the subject might be of interest to the man who'd hired me to trail her, and I'd spent many of Monument Records' nickels to report it. It wasn't my fault that the creep who was paying me was a nine-to-five bureaucrat addicted to an eight-hour workday. Although God only knew what a joyless slug like Harker did with the time he didn't spend at work. Probably combed through back issues of Popular Mechanics in search of new insights into human psychology.

  I tried the number again anyway. Zero. Harker was off practicing his eyelock in a bathroom mirror or working up expressions that would persuade the fired help to quit without severance. With a third cup of Roxanne's coffee in hand, I climbed out onto the deck to look at the world.

  All was right with it. The clouds were lifting to reveal a hard line of silver above the mountains that God put there to keep me from wasting my days staring at the Pacific, and things smelled wet and clean, with that sharp, new odor that rain always leaves as a consolation prize for slick roads and leaky roofs. A mockingbird, drunk on clean air, let rip with a confused jigsaw puzzle of other birds' songs. Mozart would have envied it. It was a morning Sally Oldfield would have enjoyed. She would have looked at it and laughed. She was the only woman I'd ever seen who laughed at a dropped bag of groceries.

  And that made me mad enough to try the sacrosanct corporate number, the one he'd told me never to use. I stood there chewing on the grounds in the bottom of the cup while the Monument Records switchboard did its clumsy imitation of the human nervous system, ultimately directing my call to the waiting ear of Harker's secretary.

  “Mr. Harker's office,” she said in the voice of a woman who'd said it too often. She was the same one I'd talked to in my prior incarnation as Clyde Barrows.

  No, he wasn't in. He usually got in about ten or ten-thirty, but if it was urgent she promised to have him call me the moment he lifted his oversize shoes across the threshold. I left my name, number, and the assurance that the call was urgent, and looked at a couple of empty hours.

  There was the computer to kill time with. I'd re
cently bought a spreadsheet program that snickered at my finances every time I booted it. I didn't feel up to it. There was always Flight Simulator, but recently I'd felt less assured that my career path would ever lead me to the point where I'd be trying to land my private plane at Burbank Airport. That left the phone, so I used it.

  “Henry, city desk,” said my ex-student. He'd overcome a lot of obstacles, including the course in Precursors of Shakespeare that I'd taught at UCLA and the fact that his given name was Patrick, to land a job as a reporter at the L.A. Times.

  “Pat,” I said. “Simeon. What's yellow journalism paying these days?”

  “Green,” he said. “How much of it do you need?”

  “It runs into seven figures. As in a license plate. Have the cops run a make yet on the car in that motel murder last night?”

  “Motel murder where?”

  “Jesus, Pat, how many were there?”

  “Three.”

  I wondered whether Norman Bates was in town. “This was on Sunset, in Hollywood.”

  “Jane Doe,” he said.

  I digested that.

  “White woman,” Pat said. “Early thirties, right?”

  “No identification?” I said.

  “Clean as a whistle. Just like it said in the paper.” He paused for a second. “Do you know anything I don't know?”

  “I probably know lots of things you don't know.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “what makes you think there was a car involved?”

  “It was a motel. Motels take license numbers. Checks bounce but license plates don't.”

  “This one did,” he said. “As you'd know if you read the Times or anything more current than Homer. The car was stolen.”

  “From whom?” I said.

  “Why?” he said.

  “I'm a concerned citizen. You know how concerned I am. Remember how concerned I was when you bought your term paper from that Iranian?”

  “There was nothing wrong with that paper,” he said defensively. It was an old argument.

  “No. It would have been perfect if it hadn't implicated Allah as the deity responsible for the deus ex machina in the last act of an Elizabethan play. That's one of the things I know that you don't know, that Elizabethans didn't know Allah from Colonel Sanders.”

  “You didn't flunk me,” he said.

  “No, I didn't. So who was the car stolen from?”

  There was a pause. “I don't know. I should, but I don't.”

  “If you find out, call me, okay?”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Tell me about that term paper.”

  “Oh, shit. I'll call you. But when there's something we can print, you tell me first, right?”

  “Make a deal?”

  “Let's hear it.”

  “Here's another license plate. Check it for me and I promise that I'll call you first if there's ever anything.”

  “Cross your heart and swear to God?”

  “Come on, Pat. You know I can't do two things at the same time.” I gave him the license number of Sally Oldfield's chubby girlfriend.

  “I'm going to have to talk to the cops, you know.”

  “Tell them it has to do with the Girl Scout Cookie scam.”

  “The what scam?”

  “Read the Herald Examiner,” I said. I hung up.

  An hour later Harker still hadn't called, although Mrs. Yount had. Twice. I'd let her talk to the answering machine while I did two hundred sit-ups as part of the installment plan on a flat stomach I was purchasing with sweat and boredom, and I'd fed a little lettuce to my one surviving parakeet, Gretel. Someone had twisted Hansel's head off by way of saying hello a few months earlier. That time I'd been lucky; Hansel was the only one I'd cared about who'd been killed.

  Thirty minutes and half a new pot of coffee after that, my patience had given out. This time Harker's secretary told me that he was in a meeting and couldn't be disturbed.

  “I'm very disturbed,” I said. “Tell him it's Simeon Grist and tell him that I'm calling the cops if he doesn’t talk to me.”

  “Geez, the cops?” she said. “Will he know what it's about?”

  “Tell him Sally Oldfield.”

  “He knows Miss Oldfield. What about her?”

  “You have a lovely voice,” I said. “Will you put me on hold and give him the message?”

  “Gee, thanks, I mean, I don't know. He's like a grizzly bear when he gets interrupted.”

  “Interrupt him. Tell him I'm going to the cops if he won't talk to me.”

  “Jeez,” she said again. “Hang on a minute.”

  I held on. One of Monument Records' nominal stars crooned something about love on the run. It sounded uncomfortable.

  “He got all grizzly,” she said. “But he held up twelve fingers, I mean first ten and then two—even he doesn't have twelve fingers—and I think that means he'll see you at noon. Do you know where we are?”

  “Everyone in the world knows where that building is. See you at noon.”

  We both hung up, the one form of climax that people frequently attain simultaneously. I pulled on some running clothes and headed for the beach.

  I ran five miles in the softest sand I could find and then headed uphill toward Santa Monica. By the time I got back down to Alice, I knew what I wanted to say to Ambrose Harker. I had a lot of general questions about the surveillance, and a lot of specific questions about Sally Oldfield. It was pretty clear that most of what I'd been told was goop, pure and simple, and I thought the police would be interested in it. Enjoying the prospect of ruining Harker's day, I jumped into a cold wave and washed the sweat off before driving to UCLA for a long sauna.

  All of what Eleanor calls the toxins had been sweated out of my system by the time I gave my name to the guard at Monument Records. He checked the list and directed me to Harker's office on the eighth floor, higher than the hoi polloi but well below the upper-executive stratosphere.

  The secretary with the lovely voice weighed two hundred chocolate-ridden pounds. The terrible thing was that her face was so beautiful and that her smile could have illuminated Century City. A wedding ring cut deeply into her finger. Maybe it was the man's fault. For lack of anything better to do, I sat on the couch and picked up a copy of Record World.

  A buzzer on her desk did its thing. “He'll be right out,” she said, with her incandescent smile.

  Ambrose Harker strode out of his office door looking grim and businesslike. He didn't extend his hand.

  “Okay,” he said. “What's all this crap about the cops?”

  I knew I was supposed to say something, but I couldn't, because my mouth was hanging wide open. I'd never seen Ambrose Harker in my life.

  Chapter 5

  Big Sur is a long way from anywhere, and that's where it should be. If it were any closer it would look like the rest of the world.

  As it is, it looks like Big Sur: cliffs overhanging the grayest Pacific on earth, Monterey cypresses perched on fragile spits of land, defying gravity to dangle their gray-green needles over the eternal churn of the sea. It's so perfect that a Hollywood boy like me expects a credit roll scrolling above the horizon. Scenic designer: God. Special effects: the Apostles, and so forth.

  Only two kinds of people lived there, rich straights and poor crazies. As I steered a rented car out of Carmel airport at five p.m., I had no idea which kind I was going to see.

  I'd made an embarrassed exit from Ambrose Harker's office, thinking about calling the cops, but to give them what? They already had Needle-nose's description from the motel, they already had the license number of his stolen car, they already had the number of times he and Sally had been there. What I had was a client who didn't exist and a burning sense of having been suckered.

  They didn't have Sally's name, but they'd get that quickly enough. And if they didn't, I might be able to use it as a bargaining chip for a fact or two.

  I also had the fact that Skippy Miller had recommended me for the job. And that was all
I had. A poor thing, but mine own.

  Cypress Grove was a conference center located in the center square of God's country. On a map of paradise, it would have been C-3. I hiked down the hill from the parking lot through a stiff November sea breeze, to Reception. WELCOME, the banner read, THE CHURCH OF THE ETERNAL MOMENT IS HERE AND NOW. Beneath the banner was a long Formica table at which were seated two identically gray-costumed individuals wearing Chinese cadre jackets that Mao wouldn't have sneered at. The nameplates in front of them read LISTENER DOOLEY and LISTENER SIMPSON. Listener Dooley was a red-faced Irishman with the kind of highly weathered nose that, when it occurs in fur-bearing species, causes taxidermists to look for new materials; Listener Simpson was about twenty-four and very pretty. Listener Dooley was snoring gently, which made it easier to follow my instincts and choose Listener Simpson.

  “Welcome to the present,” Listener Simpson said. Her eyes were a disconcerting shade of ice-blue. Behind her hung a beautifully lit color photograph of a woman and a little girl of eleven or twelve. The little girl's blond hair cascaded down over the shoulders of her immaculate white dress.

  “It's kind of hard to escape from the present,” I said. “People spend millions trying to do it. Looks like Listener Dooley's managed.”

  Listener Simpson's cool blue eyes flicked down to a photocopied sheet in front of her and her voice cooled a couple of degrees. “Are you expected?” she asked.

  “Anything can happen in the present. ‘Expected’ is sort of future tense, don't you think?”

  “I think that you don't understand the present,” she said without looking up. “Everything is here and everything is now. Could I have your name, please?”

  “Grist,” I said. “But you won't find it there. I'm looking for Skippy Miller.”

  “Mr. Miller is here.”

  “And now. Can someone tell him I'm also here? Now?”

  Her eyes engaged mine and held them. “That depends,” she said, “on what you want, and on whether he'll want to see you.”