The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  I tried to remember what I'd told Rhoda on the phone, couldn't, and said, ”A few months. Enough to want to try to find her.” I'd spent most of two days finding out everything I could about Sally Oldfield, and I almost felt like I was telling the truth. Patrick Henry had used his L.A. Times clout to trace Rhoda Gerwitz's name from the license plate I gave him, in exchange for a renewed promise to speak to him and only him when and if there were anything worth telling. I'd called Rhoda at Monument Records and set up a lunch.

  “The cops,” Rhoda was saying. “If she's not dead, they don't want to know about it. It's enough to make you crazy. I've been to her house, knocked on the door, phoned her a dozen times. They didn't even know the color of her eyes. And then there's Herbert. Herbert—that's el jerkerino's name—says to me, ‘You don't need a bridesmaid to get married, all you need is a groom.’ Can you imagine? All I asked was to put it off until she turned up, or. . . well, you know. The sonofabitch. But listen, even if he's as dumb as a toadstool, you're not supposed to explain to a guy that's popped the question, so to speak, that a husband is a husband but a girlfriend is for life. This is not considered good strategy in the war between the sexes.” The skin around her eyes crumpled up and she poked the hamburger with her index finger. It didn't poke back. “Do you think she's okay?” she asked the hamburger. “I don't think she's okay.”

  She blinked a couple of times, fast. “Can you return a wedding gown?” she said.

  “I don't know. I've never bought one.”

  “Sally said . . .” She swallowed even though her mouth was empty. “Sally said that the trouble with a wedding gown was all those miles of fabric. If the bride had as much mileage on her as the gown, she said, no man would ever get married.” She tried a smile but it didn't work out. “Anyway, they had to let it out,” she said. “After all those salads. They're not going to take it back. And even if they did, I think I'd keep it. As a reminder of all the jerks in the world.” She lifted her glass of beer.

  “To Sally turning up safe,” she said. “So you're a bachelor, huh?”

  “I'm too old to be a bachelor. I'm an old maid.”

  “What're you anyway, thirty, thirty-one?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Sally is thirty-two. Always worried about her birthday, which, by the way, is coming up, always wrinkling her nose like every birthday took her one step closer to looking like Margo coming out of Shangri-La, you know that movie? She's always checking her hair like she expects it to be four feet long and gray.” She swirled the beer in the glass. “Shit,” she said, looking at it, “she'd better be okay.”

  The waiter appeared. It was Roberto. Everybody who worked at Monument Records seemed to eat at Nickodell's, and Rhoda had chosen it out of all the restaurants in Hollywood when I'd called to ask her to lunch. Roberto looked more than professionally concerned. “Somethin’ wrong with the lady's hamburger?”

  Rhoda summoned up a sweet smile. “No,” she said, “the hamburger's fine. Something's wrong with the lady.”

  “You wan’ Pepto-Bismol?” Roberto asked. “We always got a lot of Pepto-Bismol.” He smiled sympathetically and included me in it. “Pepto-Bismol is our insurance company.”

  “It's okay, Roberto.” He started to leave. “Wait,” I said. “Last time I was in here, the guy I was with, you remember?”

  “Terrible guy, bad-lookin’ guy. Look like he wan’ to eat the Easter bunny raw. I remember.”

  “Did you ever see him before? Do you know his name?”

  Roberto squinted at the wall as if he expected to see a Technicolor film unspool on its surface. ”Naw,” he finally said. “Somebody as mean as that, I remember.” He shrugged. “Sorry,” he said, dismissing it. In a waiter's world there are a lot of bad guys.

  “No problem. Thanks anyway.”

  “So what was that about?” Rhoda said as Roberto vanished toward the kitchen.

  “Nothing. Another shitty business lunch.”

  “Yeah. A business lunch is the shortest route between eating and the bathroom. Do not pass go. Do not taste. In fact, skip the esophagus entirely. It’ supposed to punctuate the day, right? Sally said once that lunch was the only punctuation mark softer than a comma.”

  “You're good friends.”

  “She's a good friend. You think I'm easy to put up with? Until Herbert proposed I was five miles of barbed wire. Get married, everybody kept saying. Listen to your biological tock clicking.” She picked up her beer and looked at it with one eye shut. “ Tock clicking,’ ” she said. “Am I a cheap drunk, or what? So no wonder I was grouchy, the whole world waiting to watch me walk the plank to Lohengrin, all these damn women in Connecticut writing big fat books about the joys of late-life motherhood, and all I really want to do is go home to my dinky little apartment, feed the cat, and try to stay reasonably sober until it's time for David Letterman. Otherwise I don't get the jokes.”

  She drew a long breath. “Sally let me take it all out on her. When Herbert, may he catch a fatal case of athlete's foot and die slowly from his ankles up, when Herbert proposed and I didn't know what to do, Sally listened to me for weeks and weeks. Must have seemed like years to her. One day I was yes, one day I was no. Whichever way I felt, I'd ask for advice, which Sally would dutifully give, and I'd be back the next day with the same goddamned questions. And she'd listen again and give me advice again, and then we'd do it all over.”

  She picked up the beer and put it down again. “I'd like a real drink,” she said. ”A screwdriver, is that okay?”

  I signaled for Roberto and ordered. “What advice did she give you? Did she want you to marry Herbert or not?”

  Rhoda's laugh was short and dry. “She didn't give a shit either way. She just wanted me to do whatever would make me happy. It wouldn't have made any difference if Herbert was Bigfoot, as long as she was sure that he was what I wanted. Hell, if Bigfoot had been the boy of my dreams, she would have helped him rent a tuxedo.”

  “She was indifferent?”

  She gave me a long look while she tried to figure out what to say. “No,” she said finally. “She wasn't indifferent. She just wanted to make sure that I was doing what I really wanted. If I did, whatever that was, it was okay with her.

  “She kept asking me questions. Sometimes they seemed dumb, like who was more important to me, my mother or me? Except, you see, that's not so dumb, because it's my mother who really wants me to get married. Or she'd ask me things about Herbert, like did he have a good time when he got drunk, and what didn't he want to talk about ever, and did he make love like it was fun or like he was trying to remember how he was supposed to do it, and did he seem to have a sense of humor about his underwear? Questions that made me look at him different. Wasted effort, the putz.”

  “Is Sally married?”

  “Sally? Sally married?” She picked up the screwdriver and took a long pull. “Golly, do you know, I don't know.” She looked stricken. “Gee, isn't that awful? That's the kind of question Sally used to ask, something that made you realize something about yourself. Oh, my God, I'm ashamed of myself. I was so busy talking to her that I hardly ever listened.”

  “In every relationship there's a talker and a listener. You're the talker, that's all,” I said, trying to smooth her out. “Sally is the listener.” Then I shut up so I could register the little click in my brain. I looked at a morose knot of disc jockeys at the bar; ratings must have been down. “Rhoda. What's Sally's religion?”

  “Religion? That she does talk about, in the last year or so, anyway. She keeps trying to get me to go with her. I'm not much into religion, you know, I'm supposed to be a Jew but I might just as well be a Chevrolet for all the attention I pay to it. But one thing I've got less than zero interest in is trendy California cults.”

  “I'm sorry to do this,” I said, standing up, “but I've got to go. Listen, the meal, anything you want, it's all on my credit card, and it's already signed. Have another drink, have a burger, have whatever you like. Better still, call i
n sick and go home, skip the rest of the day. Wash your hair. Stop worrying about Sally. Maybe you did do all the talking, but you're a terrific person and she was lucky to have you.”

  She looked up at me with her mouth open.

  “And when Herbert calls,” I said, “tell him to go fuck himself.”

  Sally was a Listener. Listener Simpson's mania for clarity had echoed Harker's insistence on understanding. That had been the only part of my description of Harker that had brought Skippy down from his plateau of bliss. I had to get home and review my notes.

  At the bottom of my unpaved driveway I caught a whiff of something sharp, sweet, old, and slightly sickening. I slowed down for a moment to check it out but didn't see anything. Then, in a hurry, I slogged up through the mud at a forty-degree angle, slipping and falling to my knees only twice, not bad for a wet November afternoon on an unpaved driveway that asked nothing less from the world than that it should be beamed up Star Trek-style and then let down in Switzerland, where it could be pressed into service as an Olympic ski ramp.

  That would be all right if the house at the top of it were worth getting to. It was slapped together in the twenties by an embittered alcoholic hermit who wanted to flee the madding crowd. He kept himself relatively sober long enough to build the thing—it couldn't have taken more than a couple of months—and then went on a bourbon toot that ended a year later when he saw workers paving Old Topanga Canyon about a half-mile below. He promptly tied a rope around the living-room rafter and kicked a chair out from under him.

  He hung there, mummified by the dry summer heat, like a big strip of bacon for a couple of years, sharing the house with a pair of red-tailed hawks, until he was discovered by a determined census taker. The house passed to the hermit's sister, and then to her son, who went to the Balkans and took himself a Balkan bride during World War II. He then got himself killed in the war, and ownership of the house devolved upon the Balkan bride, Mrs. Yount. The house was essentially a three-room wooden cabin, but it had the best view in Topanga, all the way from the massive red outcrop of Big Rock to the little settlement of Topanga on the way to the ocean. And there were acres of clean stars above it at night.

  Of course, to get to all of that, you had to climb the driveway. Once I made it to the top and muscled open the swollen wooden door, I looked on top of the computer, the first place I always looked because it was where I put everything. And there they were. Before I looked at them, I got a fire burning in the potbellied stove.

  With the wood crackling, steam rising from the damp carpet, and rain throwing handfuls of tacks against the roof, I surveyed my options. There were remarkably few of them.

  I didn't have a client. I did have a grudge against Needle-nose. I'd liked Sally Oldfield. And I had some information. Whatever chain of events had culminated in the murder of Sally Oldfield had begun with the Church of the Eternal Moment.

  The obvious thing to do was call the cops.

  Generally, I'd prefer not to call the cops. If everybody called the cops, I wouldn't be in business, and I'd hate to start a trend. But nobody was paying for my time now that the ersatz Ambrose Harker had faded back into whatever woodwork he'd crawled out of, and somebody had to do something about Sally.

  So I went over to the computer, got the folded printout of my notes on the case, smoothed them open, and read over them. Then I did what I didn't want to do. I called my pet cop.

  Alvin Hammond, Sergeant, LAPD, didn't know he was my pet cop. Sergeant Hammond weighed a conservative two hundred and thirty-five pounds, ten pounds of which were bass voice and twenty-five pounds of which were potential whisker, and he wasn't given to terms of coy affection, however discreet. What Sergeant Hammond was given to was drinking lethal quantities of Scotch in cop bars, with the ultimate objective of being the last man in the room who could stand up. I'd begun risking life and liver in police bars downtown when I first became an investigator. It had occurred to me that I might need to know one cop better than you usually get to know the guy who's writing you a speeding ticket. I'd remained relatively conscious longer than Al Hammond on two or three nights, and that was the extent of the bond between us.

  “Records,” said a young voice on the other end of the phone. Al had been in Records for a year as punishment for neglecting to read some well-connected alleged perp's rights to him, and he wanted to get out about as badly as most would-be transsexuals wanted to get to Denmark and the right doctor.

  “Is Al Hammond around?” You didn't call him Alvin, at least not if you wanted to remain an operative biped.

  “Sergeant Hammond is indisposed.”

  “What happened? They put a new stock of magazines in the John?”

  “Is that supposed to be funny, sir?” Great. A prissy cop.

  “A thousand apologies for my lapse in taste. I thought I was talking to the LAPD.”

  “Your name, sir?”

  “Inspector Grist. What's yours, son?”

  I could actually hear him sit up. “Um, Hinckley, sir. I mean, Inspector.”

  “Um Hinckley? That's an unusual name. What is it, Welsh?”

  “Actually, sir, it's English.”

  “Well, Um Hinckley, why don't you trot along and see if you can snap Sergeant Hammond out of his fleshy reverie and get him to the phone. Tout suite, okay?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And let's have a little snap to it.”

  “Yes, sir” The phone clattered to the desk.

  I flipped through my notes, put the phone down to get a pencil, and added Rhoda Gerwitz's name and phone number. When I came back to the phone, Hammond was already there.

  “There's a patrol car on the way,” he said.

  “I'm in no danger.”

  “Yes, you are. It's against the law to impersonate an officer. Poor Hinckley's shitting bricks.”

  “It's probably the first bowel movement he's had in months, then. If his ass were any tighter he could wear it on his forehead and no one would notice. Did you lend him your magazine?”

  “The Atlantic Monthly,” he said. “I never miss the book reviews.”

  “Where did Hinckley come from, anyway? Promoted directly from the Brownies?”

  “Times being what they are, we're lucky to have him. You think he's bad”—he exhaled a lungful of smoke—“you should see Willis. It takes him ten minutes to get into his uniform and fifteen to do his eyes. What do you want, anyway?”

  “Oh, you know. Catching up with an old friend. Taking notes on how a real man talks. Passing time until the videotape rewinds.”

  “I'm being paid by the city,” he said with exaggerated patience. “These are your tax dollars at work, here.”

  “This will surprise you, but I don't want anything. I'm calling to give you something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a Jane Doe. Recently deceased in the Sleepy Bear Motel on Sunset.”

  “That block, we call it Sinset.”

  “Clever.”

  “These are the jokes,” he said. “You don't like them, go back to the VCR.”

  “I don't like them, I call the Times. They might be interested in an unsolved murder.”

  “I'm interested. If you were here you could see how my ears are standing up. You could see me reaching for a pencil and a clean sheet of paper. You could see me dreaming about getting out of here and making lieutenant.”

  “I don't want to talk on the phone,” I said. “I've got some notes that I want to give you. When can I see you?”

  “You know who she is? You know who bought her the big ticket?”

  “The big ticket?” I said. ”Al, are you on TV? Is there a Sixty Minutes crew in the room?”

  “What have you got?” he asked impatiently.

  “Some facts that might keep you awake.”

  “This is straight?”

  “Straighter than Carrie Nation.”

  “Not here, then. I'd like to keep it to myself until I can pop it at the morning meeting. I get off at nine. How
about the Red Dog?”

  The Red Dog was one of Al's bars, all Scotch and sawdust on the floor. The male-hormone content at any given moment was higher than that of the East German women's Olympic track team.

  “The Red Dog,” I said. “Nine-thirty.”

  “What's her name?”

  “And her address,” I said. “But not till the Red Dog. You're buying.”

  “Wear a white carnation so I'll know you.”

  “In the Red Dog? We're talking about multiple fractures for dessert.”

  “Yeah,” he said, hanging up.

  I didn't have anything to do in the meantime, so I did it. After I hung up I tried to avoid the refrigerator, which was waving its handle at me to remind me of the three sixteen-ounce bottles of Singha Beer inside, resting innocently on their sides. I reviewed my notes and looked at my watch. After eleven minutes I stopped reviewing my notes, got up, and reviewed the refrigerator. It looked the same as ever on the outside, my shopping list scrawled on the door in erasable Magic Marker. It looked the same on the inside, too, until I closed the door. When I did, there were only two bottles of Singha inside.

  Ten minutes later, and feeling considerably better, I was reopening the refrigerator door when the phone rang. “Balls,” I said to the beer. I tracked across the living room and picked up the phone.

  “Al?” I said.

  “Who the hell is Al?” said a voice that I remembered only too well. “This is Ambrose Harker.”

  Chapter 9

  With my left hand I hit the record button on the answering machine and vamped until the red light came on.

  “I've seen many unexpected things on my journey through the world,” I said, “but even to me it seems improbable that life is full of people named Ambrose Harker. And yet, apparently it is.” The light blinked once and then glowed steadily. “Which Ambrose Harker is this?”