The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  “My dear,” he said.

  “Oh, shut up,” she snapped venomously. “Which do you want, the cops or the Church? It was that crap doctor.”

  “What did she find out?”

  “We didn't ask,” Jenks said. “We didn't want to know.”

  “They'd known each other somewhere,” Mrs. Jenks plowed stubbornly on. “Or she'd known him, anyway. She recognized him from somewhere, and she was dismayed. She was crying.”

  I looked around the office, picturing Jenks, or Wilburforce, sitting fatly behind his desk and Sally crying. She'd run here. Of all the places in Los Angeles, of all the places in the world, she'd run here.

  “You didn't ask what she'd learned?”

  “As I said,” Jenks repeated, “we didn't want to know. We've had our little experience with Dr. Merryman, thank you. He's nobody you want to fool around with, unless you're a snake charmer. And even then, you'd have to be careful. We wanted no part of it. Did we, dear?” he asked Sister Zachary.

  “Not an iota,” she said.

  “So tell me about Merryman.”

  Jenks looked, if possible, even less comfortable. “He's Angel's physician,” he said. “Although my guess is that he's not really an internist at all.”

  “Why?”

  “My good man,” Jenks said with a hint of his old manner. “I know more about the thorax than he does. What Merryman doesn't know about internal medicine would fill a library.”

  “So what is he?”

  “My personal guess is that he's a classic sociopath. But who am I? I haven't practiced psychiatry yet. He could be a hat salesman for all I know.”

  “But he takes care of Angel,” I said.

  “She's a healthy little girl. They've all been healthy little girls. Most of what a doctor does, you know, is waiting for fatal signs to develop.”

  “And then what?”

  “He sends the patient to a specialist.”

  “And where did you send Sally?”

  “Good Lord,” Jenks said. “Do I really have to tell you that?”

  “First tell me what Merryman's real position is in the Church.”

  “Well, he's sort of in charge, isn't he?” Jenks said, looking at his wife for support. “He and Brooks, I mean.”

  “Meredith Brooks.”

  “Who else? Not that they like each other. Doctors and lawyers, you know.”

  “Sssssss,” Sister Zachary hissed.

  “Well, my dear,” Jenks said placatingly, “he's going to find out anyway.”

  “Is there a feud?”

  “That's one way of putting it.”

  “Serious?”

  He pursed his lips retentively. “Perhaps. There is the potential there, let us say, for killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.” He seemed very happy with the phrase.

  “How long has he been with the Church?”

  “Seven or eight years. He came about a year before we . . . withdrew.”

  “He threw you out.”

  “Yes,” Sister Zachary said.

  “No,” Jenks said, over her. “We've explained all this. We left after Anna was killed, and they—by which I mean Brooks—started trying to draft a new Speaker. And then, when they found, or rather created, little Jessica, Merryman came with her, more or less. He was involved with Doris Fram, that tramp. Jessica's mother. Then, of course, he was involved with dear Mary Claire. Dr. Merryman is a man who likes to be involved. I always thought Angel was as dull as dirt,” he added irrelevantly.

  “Where's Jessica now?”

  Jenks swallowed. “Jessica? What do you want with her?”

  “That's not important. Just tell me where she is.”

  He looked at Sister Zachary. Sister Zachary gave a minuscule nod. “You're going to keep us out of it?” Jenks said.

  “If I can.”

  He hesitated, then lifted himself off the desk and trudged around behind it. His pants were shiny in the seat. He opened a drawer in the back of the desk and pulled out a slender address book. He riffled through its pages and then looked back up at me.

  “You promise,” he said.

  “If I can do it, I will.”

  “That's not much.”

  “It's all you're going to get.”

  “Give it to him,” Sister Zachary said fatalistically. “What else can you do?”

  He wrote something on a card and then bustled back around the desk and handed it to me. He looked very nervous.

  “Tell me how the Revealings work.”

  “I really don't know,” he said. “Anna was a bona fide channel. I've always assumed that the other two were suggestible enough, and wanted approval badly enough, to hear voices of their own.”

  I looked at him skeptically. “If he knew how to do it,” Sister Zachary said with a bite in her voice, “don't you think we'd have a Speaker too?”

  The two of them glared at each other.

  “So,” I said, pocketing the card, “who'd you sell Sally to?”

  Jenks looked surprised that I'd had to ask.

  “To Brooks, of course,” he said piously. “Merryman would have killed her.”

  Out on Vermont I squinted into the sunshine and plotted my day. The sky was almost clear for the first time in a week, and the pavement was already drying. Heaven seemed near at hand. It was the kind of day when you could drive forever, which was probably what I was going to do.

  I ticked off the possible stops on my itinerary. Get a different car, take Eleanor back home to help her pack, talk to Speaker Number Two—Jessica Fram—and nail Brooks's ears to the nearest wall. The order sounded about right. I wanted to get Brooks at home, not at the office. I didn't think the formidable Marcy would let me back in.

  Wrent-a-Wreck on Hawthorne had just opened for business as I pulled in. The manager was a potbellied little man in a tight white T-shirt. The T-shirt said nothing. It was a real, honest-to-God undershirt.

  “I didn't think they made them anymore,” I said.

  “They're not easy to get, let me tell you,” he said. “Try to find something white at a white sale. But if somebody wants to write on my chest, let ‘em pay me rent, that's what I always say.” He gave Alice an appraising eye.

  “Low-rider special, huh? Haven't seen one of these since JFK. What's ‘Sweet lice’ mean?”

  “It used to be Alice,” I said defensively. ” ‘Sweet Alice.’ The A came off.”

  “You want to sell her? I could probably do some business with a heap like this. Penetrate the Cholo market. Big Hispanic bucks in L.A. now.”

  “What I want,” I said, “is to leave her here for a couple of days and drive away in one of yours. Some nice, dull, anonymous, average, medium-size car with no pizzazz and no writing on it and very small license plates.”

  “Bank job, huh?” He gave a short barking laugh.

  “No,” I said. “I'm only going to drive it to church.”

  Getting Eleanor moved was harder. For one thing, she didn't want to leave the office at that point.

  “I just got here,” she said. “How can I turn around and walk back out?”

  “How about I call in a bomb threat and when they evacuate the building you can just get into my car?”

  “You remember Jackie Vinh?”

  “Sure. She was with your ex-idiot at that Halloween party. What has she got to do with anything?”

  “I talked to her this morning. That's why I'm late. She's a nursing student. She said she'd call Mr. Ellspeth today and see if she can help out with Ansel. She's a nice girl.”

  “You're not so bad yourself. Let's go.”

  “I can't. You'll have to come back.”

  “Eleanor, I have a day in front of me that does not make it possible for me to waffle hither and yon. I can manage hither maybe once if the traffic lights aren't against me. Why don't you make out a list of what you need and then give me your key, and I'll drop the stuff by right after lunch.”

  “Do you really think this is necessary?”

  �
��After last night, I certainly do.”

  “Well,” she said grumpily, “I think it's melodramatic. And you'll never find everything I need.”

  Nevertheless, she gave me the key and a relatively brief list and I headed out toward the beach.

  Jenks and Mrs. Jenks had made it pretty clear that there was a major split in the Church and that the main splittees were Brooks and Merryman. If my reading was right, Brooks controlled the dollars and Merryman controlled the Speaker. They needed each other. And they hated each other.

  When Sally recognized Merryman for whatever or whoever he really was, she'd run to kindly old Hubert Wilburforce, who had promptly sold her to Brooks for $100,000 and the dismissal of a suit the Church had pending against the Congregation. Brooks, I would have thought, would have put her in a safe-deposit box as a piece of highly negotiable currency if she really knew something heinous about the good doctor. Instead, she'd been killed.

  I was very anxious to have another talk with Brooks.

  Eleanor's place seemed secure. The door was locked, none of the windows had been broken, and when I got inside, things were in their usual obsessive state of Eleanor neatness. It took me maybe forty-five minutes to pack everything she'd listed. I threw in a few things she'd forgotten, too. Shoes, for example. Eleanor belonged to the Bernie school of packing.

  When I left, it was barely noon. Jessica Fram lived in the Valley, so I took the Santa Monica freeway to the 405 and pointed my awful, rattling little Camaro due north. It was a depressing shade of battleship gray that laughed at dirt. That's probably why they paint battleships that color. All that swabbing for nothing.

  Jessica's house was in Reseda. It sat in the center of a flat little tract block that managed to stay brown even after all that rain. What lawns there were seemed to be made largely of mud. Dogs of indeterminate breed sprouted from it.

  The only difference between the Fram house and the ones flanking it was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with an extra foot of barbed wire on top. One of those boxes with a button and a microphone sat perched on a pole next to the driveway, looking like a forlorn transplant from Bel Air.

  For about fifteen minutes I sat in the Camaro at the end of the block and studied the house. Nothing moved. The curtains were drawn against the day's new sunlight, and two cars, washed by the rain, sparkled in the driveway on the other side of the fence. They were the only sign that anyone was home.

  At twenty minutes to one the front door of the house opened and a middle-aged woman with short steel-gray hair came briskly out. The gate slid open. The woman gave the neighborhood a practiced once-over, pausing only for an instant at my car, and then hopped into a butch black Land Rover and backed out into the street. She ignored me completely as she passed. Maybe there was something to be said for the Camaro's color.

  I pulled the Camaro up to the black speaker box and pressed the button. After what seemed like weeks a woman's voice bellowed, “Hermia?”

  “No, it's not Hermia,” I said. “I'm here to see Jessica.”

  There was a pause you could have driven a motor home through.

  “For what?” the woman said. “She's in bed.”

  I looked at my watch again. Twelve-forty-five. Jessica certainly led a difficult life. I mentally flipped another coin.

  “Dick sent me,” I said.

  After a long moment the gate rolled crankily open. I drove in.

  Chapter 22

  Her hair was long and straight and bleached and deader than the Dead Sea Scrolls. She lay on the living-room couch under a handmade quilt with her arms stretched out on top of it, palms up, like an ascetic nun waiting to receive the stigmata. She couldn't have been more than seventeen.

  A vague, frayed lady who had to be Mrs. Fram had ushered me into a tiny Formica dining room and asked me to wait. Unwatered house plants languished despondently in a window box. Mrs. Fram was either the most laid-back woman I'd ever met or the most heavily sedated.

  “Sit,” she'd said blearily. “There's four chairs.” There were six. On the wall was an absolutely enormous color photograph of her and Jessica. It might have been taken before World War I for all the resemblance it bore to Mrs. Fram.

  “Pretty picture,” I said conversationally.

  “Uh,” she said, looking at it as though she'd never seen it before.

  “Spontaneous generation,” I suggested. “Pictures are always appearing on my walls too.”

  She watched my mouth as I talked, looking like a lip-reader trying to follow a silent movie. Then she took a woozy look at the picture.

  “Me and Baby,” she said. “Sit. You just missed Hermia. She'll be back.”

  Since I was already sitting, there wasn't much for me to do. “I'm not here to see Hermia,” I reminded her.

  “Dick sent you,” she said with an effort. She might have been pretty once—the picture certainly suggested that she had—but now the flesh hung slack and heavy on her face, and deep circles had worn themselves darkly and permanently into the pouchy area beneath her eyes. The creases around her eyes and mouth, even the creases in her forehead, all pulled downward. It was a face created by erosion. “Dick,” she said again in a harsh tone. “He was here. Just a couple days, I think.”

  “Well,” I said brightly, “he's sent me this time. I think you said Jessica was in bed.” I wiggled my eyebrows encouragingly. It was like talking to someone a hundred yards away; I found myself using body language to get the point across.

  And a lot of good it did, too. She looked at me as I talked, and then, when I finished, she went on looking at me. I had a feeling she'd forgotten what I'd said. Then she said, “Tuesday. It was Tuesday.” Satisfied with her feat of memory, she scratched her forearm absently for a moment. Then she told me to sit down again, pivoted uncertainly, and left the room. She dragged her feet when she walked, and her shoes slapped against the floor. “Baby?” I heard her call. “Baby. Time to get up.”

  I spent the next ten minutes or so watering plants and snooping through the mail on the dining-room table. Quite a lot of it was from the Church: invitations to Revealings, an announcement of a retreat to be held up in Ojai, a strong suggestion that members consider establishing a system of annual tithing, a sort of pre-Christmas sale on certain advanced levels of Listening. Most of it was bulk stuff; ex-Speaker or not, Jessica didn't seem to be on any special mailing list.

  At the bottom of the pile was a color photo of Angel and Mary Claire, the new one with the kitten in it. At first glance it looked like the kind of thing a junior-high-school kid might do—blacking out front teeth or drawing in a mustache. But it was more spiteful than that.

  Holes had been poked through Mary Claire's eyes. A bullet-entrance wound had been painstakingly drawn into the center of her forehead, and vivid red ink poured from it. Her bosom had been slashed raggedly with a razor blade.

  Nothing had been done to Angel.

  The picture was an unsettling combination of immature malice and adult hatred. It looked like the kind of thing the cops found hanging in David Berkowitz's bedroom when they finally nailed him as the Son of Sam. The person who'd done it wasn't all there, but she had her hatred down cold. And, of course, it had to be Mrs. Fram.

  I heard her shoes slapping against the hallway floor and shoved the picture back under the pile of mail. She pushed the door leading to the hallway closed from the other side before she passed by it. Apparently I wasn't to see Baby until Baby was ready. ‘There, Baby,” she said from the living room. “Right there. Right there.”

  There was some muffled moving around. “Cover up, now,” Mrs. Fram said in her slurred, mannish voice. ” ‘Tsa man, you know. A man from Dick.”

  “Dick,” said a small voice. “Dick's not coming?”

  “I don't know,” Mrs. Fram said curtly. “Scoot up a little.”

  “But I need him to come. He has to come.” The voice was thin and querulous, like that of a young actress trying to play an old woman.

  “Hush. You hush. How do w
e know why this man's here?”

  I stepped back from the door just as Mrs. Fram came through it. “Okay now,” she said, concentrating her gaze in my general direction. “Baby's in there.” She waved a hand behind her, in toward the living room. She went to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat heavily. She looked without interest at the pile of mail. I went into the living room.

  “Hello, Jessica,” I said.

  She'd been rouged and lipsticked crudely for the occasion, but the patches of color only heightened the pallor of her skin. The dead hair had been brushed straight down and then lifted and held in place with a black bow. She looked like a teenage Miss Havisham.

  “Is Dick coming?” she asked.

  “Not right now,” I said. “Maybe later, though.”

  She clenched both her thin fists and tightened her mouth childishly. “He likes to make me wait,” she said. “He enjoys it.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “The little yellow ones.”

  Mrs. Fram coughed in a tubercular fashion in the next room while I evaluated this. “Don't you have enough left for today?”

  “Of course I do,” she said impatiently. “Enough for tomorrow too. But he knows I get nervous when I get low. He likes it. I know he does.”

  “No, he doesn't,” I said. “He just doesn't want you to have too many of them. He's just being careful.”

  “That's what he says. That's what Aunt Hermia says too.”

  “Well, and they both care about you, don't they?”

  “I guess so,” she said reluctantly.

  “What does your mother say about it?”

  “Her,” Jessica said. “What does she know?”

  “Is Aunt Hermia really your aunt?”

  “No.” Jessica gave a spiteful little smile. “She's the dragon at the door,” she said, “and I'm the fair maiden. We should have a house with a tower so I could sleep in the very top room, and we could chain Aunt Hermia to an iron post next to the front door.”

  “And where would your mother sleep?”

  “On the floor if she wanted to. She does about half the time anyway. Sometimes she sleeps standing up, like horses are supposed to.”