Simeon Grist Mystery - 04 - Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  “You must have walked right past them.”

  I dismissed it. “Eleanor,” I said, “I need you.”

  She looked past me, at the picture window, and said nothing.

  “There’s no one I can talk to,” I said.

  “You can talk to me,” Eleanor said, her face down.

  “With him around?” I asked. “Homo imitatiens?”

  “He won’t be around tomorrow,” she said in a muffled voice.

  “I need you tonight.”

  “Well,” she said, lifting her face to me, “I’m sorry. It’s a little bit late, isn’t it? There’s a life going on here even when you’re not around, Simeon,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea that you wouldn’t be around. Lord, Simeon, how long did you think—”

  “Okay,” I said, not knowing whether I wanted to cry or kill someone. “Fine. Skip it.”

  “Please,” she said, “don’t—”

  “I’ve recorked the wine,” Burt said from the door that led to the kitchen.

  “Then we can go,” Eleanor said with her back to him, passing a hand over her face.

  “Well,” I said. “Then let’s go.”

  “Simeon,” Eleanor said. “Will you call me?”

  “Sure. See you,” I said, heading for the front door and feeling no more substantial than my own raincoat, filled with newspapers.

  Outside, the hot wind blew, and the moon shone brightly enough to evaporate water, brightly enough for me to see the unmarked police car waiting across the street. I navigated across the smooth black asphalt and looked down at Hammond.

  “Al,” I said, “you could have spared me that.”

  Hammond took a puff off the cigar I’d smelled before and leaned forward to twitch the ignition on. He used the power to hit the window button on the driver’s side, and the glass slid up. He still hadn’t looked at me.

  “You forget,” he said just before the window sealed him off, “we ain’t buddies anymore.”

  The window closed, and I lifted my arms high above my head and slammed the roof of Hammond’s car with both fists, putting a substantial dent in it, before I drove away from my ex-friend and my ex-ex-girlfriend and did what I’d been threatening to do: headed for a Holiday Inn.

  After I checked in, I hauled the stack of notebooks out of Alice’s trunk and toted them upstairs. It took two trips, just as it had going down the driveway. Then, knowing I wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway, I went out to a convenience store around the corner and bought a jar of instant coffee. It could be mixed with hot water from the tap. Or, what the hell, I could eat it with a spoon.

  The notebooks opened up like rooms from the past, furnished with odds and ends—many of them very odd and most of them dead ends—that had once seemed important. Names, dates, places, impossibly broad concepts, niggling details, the occasional carpet of plausible language to sweep stubborn facts under. I had spent fifteen years of my life doing this, and I had gotten very good at it.

  The instant coffee kept my eyes open and my heart pounding, pounding erratically but pounding, and the frequent trips to the bathroom gave me a little exercise. All in all, I was in pretty good shape at eleven the next morning when I opened the ninth book at random, somewhere toward the middle, and found myself looking down at a preliminary outline for a paper, one of literally hundreds prepared for literally dozens of classes in comparative religion.

  The paper was entitled “Faces of God,” and beneath the title, signaled by an important-looking Roman numeral, was a list of the visual traditions I’d intended to ransack with the least possible effort and at the last possible moment. And under Roman numeral III was the heading “Illuminated Manuscripts,” and below that, in parentheses, was the Incinerator’s name.

  14

  The Empire of the Sun

  “Wilton Hoxley,” EdnaVercini said promptly. She snapped her gum and took a bite of sugared doughnut that did not, against all the laws of physics, seem to dissolve her gum, then followed the doughnut with a long and apparently satisfying hit off an unfiItered Camel. “‘Tiltin’ Wilton,’ we all called him.” She chose the nearest from among a bewildering assortment of styrofoam coffee cups and slurped, making a face. “Not me, of course,” she said.

  “Of course not,” I said, wondering as I had for years whether the desk also held a set of hypodermic works. Either they were hidden in a drawer, or else heroin was the only life-threatening habit to which Edna did not subscribe. Nonetheless, she was as slender as she’d been when I’d first met her, and her forty-five-year-old complexion was flawless.

  “Good old Elvis,” Edna said, consulting another of her vices, the latest edition of the National Exposé, which lay open on her desk. “Now there was a man who knew how to eat. He would have swallowed a tennis racquet if someone could have figured out how to deep-fry it.” She advanced into the depths of her doughnut.

  “Tiltin’ Wilton,” I suggested.

  “Nice enough boy.” She shifted the doughnut to one side so she could work on the gum. “I mean, a specimen to be preserved on the end of a pin if there ever was one, but that wasn’t his fault.” Edna was second assistant to UCLA’s chief librarian.

  “Then whose fault was it?” I asked.

  “That foot,” she said. “Poor kid had a clubfoot, didn’t he?”

  “Edna,” I said, sipping from the coffee cup nearest me. It was sweet enough to gag a primrose, but the caffeine felt good as it did its dubious magic to the ganglia of my nervous centers. It was noon, and I hadn’t slept a minute. “Did he have a clubfoot?”

  “Well, sure,” she said. She searched among the flotsam and jetsam atop her desk to find something sufficiently horrible. Finally, she chose the oldest and emptiest of the coffee cups, one rimmed with lipstick above half an inch of black fluid with powdered nondairy creamer bobbing on top of it like a ghost’s dandruff. “That’s why Tiltin’ Wilton.” Edna quaffed half of the ghastly liquid in the cup before she said, “And that’s why he changed his name.”

  “To what?” I asked.

  “I just said that,” Edna said.

  “To what?” I asked.

  “Festus,” she said. She found the doughnut, picked it up in the hand with the cigarette, and made a detour to drop the butt into the film can that served her as an ashtray. The can held a little Matterhorn of cigarette butts.

  “Why Festus?” I asked.

  “Are you going to buy me lunch?” Edna said, squinting suspiciously.

  “I promised that I would.”

  “Well, I asked him why,” she said, placated. “Who wouldn’t? It was after Hephaestus,” she said. “The blacksmith of the gods, remember? Another gimp. Lame, same like him, and his mother—that was Zeus’ wife, Hera— tossed him out of Olympus because he was deformed. Poor baby,” she said, “bet he had mother trouble, too. We never would have fired him, he was terrific at his job, except that manuscripts kept disappearing.”

  “Illuminated manuscripts,” I said.

  Edna took a bite off what remained of her doughnut. “Sure,” she said, “well, bits and pieces anyway. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

  “At the moment,” I said, “we’re talking about Hephaestus. Just yesterday, or maybe it was two days ago, Blinkins was reminding me about how Prometheus stole fire from Hephaestus’ forge.”

  “Blinkins,” Edna Vercini said, making a face. “There’s a guy with rubber whips in his room if I ever saw one. But let’s not get confused. Tiltin’ got into illuminateds because the boy had a Byronic bent—no pun intended, but Byron loved the Song of Roland and so forth, the what-do-you-callems, the troubadours or chanticleers. Dated from the same time as most of the great French illuminateds. Or, I don’t know, maybe it didn’t, although that was what he said. Maybe he’d made a list of great clubfoots through history. He was certainly off enough.”

  “Off how?”

  “You don’t remember him?”

  “I met him twice, I think. He helped me research one section of a pap
er. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall him at all.”

  “I always had the feeling,” Edna said, looking for something to put into her mouth, “that he went to the men’s room whenever he had something to say to me and rehearsed it for ten minutes. It always came out perfect. If I had a question, he thought for so long before he answered it that at first I figured he was hard of hearing and raised my voice and repeated it. Felt like an ass, too. He had a way of lifting a hand to shut you up while he formulated a reply. See?” she said, picking a cup at random and drinking from it. “ ‘Formulated a reply.’ Just thinking about him has me talking that way. It was like he was translating his answer from a different language. And he had no temper.”

  “Everyone has a temper.”

  “Not old Tiltin’. Take a day when everything went wrong, and I was mad enough to spit, and everybody was yelling at everybody else, and there was Festus, calm as a cucumber. He shut a file drawer on his finger once, and the whole place went quiet, waiting to see what would happen. What happened was that he opened the file drawer very slowly with his other hand and looked down at the finger he’d slammed, which was bleeding in a fashion to capture a lot of attention, and he said, ‘Darn.’ Then he went into the bathroom and bandaged it, and when he came out he said, ‘Clumsy me.’ I mean, it was enough to give you the creeps.” She glanced down at my own bandaged finger.

  “Did he have a girlfriend?”

  “No. He thought the only thing anyone saw was that foot. Girls literally made him cringe. I’m hungry. Why are you asking about him?”

  “He’s been trying to get in touch with me,” I said, not entirely untruthfully.

  “He sure has,” she said.

  I sat up. “Edna,” I said, “what are you talking about?”

  “He phoned here, just two days ago, and left a message for you.” She smiled at me and pulled open a drawer. From it she took a tiny pink origami swan.

  As she painstakingly unfolded it into a telephone-message slip, I silently recited the days of the week twice, and then asked, “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “I wanted lunch,” she said simply. “Anyway, I was curious. Want to know what it says?”

  “If you don’t tell me,” I said, treating her to a view of my teeth, “I’ll rip your throat out.”

  “He said to tell you ‘Congratulations, Sherlock.’ And then he asked me to say ‘I’m in the book.’ ”

  “In the book,” I said stupidly.

  “The phone book,” Edna said, with discreet pity. “Can we eat now?”

  Hoxley, Festus 3921 Normal St., #7 L.A. 555-2403

  It was two-thirty. Edna, content on a Big Mac and three orders of fries, was back at her desk. I was in an oven of a phone booth, staring at the directory, feeling exhausted and excited at the same time. Since, as usual, I had nothing to write with, I tore out the page and headed for the underground garage where Alice was waiting for me.

  Normal Street, another of Hoxley’s little jokes, was a lower-middle class, or upper-lower class, enclave that stretched for two densely populated blocks just east of Virgil. Number 3921 was a stucco apartment building, two stories high. I drove the street at least a dozen times, making long spirals around the neighboring blocks, looking for a gray Mazda. I wasn’t expecting to see it, and I didn’t, although 3921 had no garages. He’d handed me the address on a platter, so he wasn’t there anymore, and he had a reason for wanting his hidey-hole discovered. Something to do, perhaps, with his rules.

  Of course, it could have been a booby trap. As I’d learned, he liked tricks.

  The tiny, narrow yards on the block were littered with bicycles and tricycles, and brown children rocketed up and down the cracked sidewalk, playing Indianapolis 500 and Indiana Jones in loud, musical Spanish. Dotted among them, like raisins in a pudding, were kids who might have been Vietnamese or Cambodians. They seemed to get along fine. Very little kids usually do.

  Unless one of them has a defect, such as a clubfoot.

  As I walked the street, I tried to remember whether I’d ever seen Wilton Hoxley standing up. It took me two passes to be sure I hadn’t. He’d always sat behind his desk, directing me politely to the volumes I’d need for my asinine paper. “Faces of God,” indeed. Now that I’d identified the context, now that I had his name, for Christ’s sake, I remembered him. What I remembered, mostly, was how polite he was.

  Then I stopped cold, dead center in front of 3921, something I hadn’t planned to do at all, frozen in my tracks by the unlocking of a memory. I’d seen him not twice but three times, and the second time I’d seen him, Eleanor had been with me. We’d been dating only a few weeks, and we were almost literally inseparable. And I remembered that he’d stood when she came in and given her something that looked like a stiff little German bow, and that he’d asked me, the third and last time, about her, and said something about how beautiful she was.

  And I’d replied with some asinine remark, offhand and falsely modest, to the effect that she was my girlfriend. Then he’d told me that I was a lucky man, and I’d said, and I remembered my exact words, “Well, that’s what UCLA is for. There are thousands of them.”

  Standing there, in the middle of Normal Street, with Hoxley’s apartment ten feet from me, I felt myself blush. What an asshole I had been. And then I saw myself on the preceding evening, being an asshole again in Eleanor’s house.

  So booby-trap me, I thought, and went up the paved walkway.

  The manager, a sign informed me, resided in Apartment 1. I lifted my hand to knock on the screen door, but a woman was already standing behind it, a stolid Mexican woman with a baby on one hip and the clearest, whitest eyes I’d seen in weeks.

  “Mr. Hoxley,” I said, feeling my own eyes scratch as I blinked, “is he in?”

  “No,” she said, “not here.”

  “He’s an old friend,” I said, thinking maybe I should just call the cops.

  “You name?” the woman said unexpectedly.

  “Um, Grist,” I said, actually having to think about it. “Simeon Grist.”

  “Moment,” she said, going away. A moment later, as promised, she opened the screen door and handed me a key. “Give back when you finish,” she said.

  I assured her that I would and climbed the stairs to the Incinerator’s apartment, inserted the key, took a deep breath, and stepped into the Empire of the Sun.

  As I pushed the door open, the lights came on. Enough pinspots to light a small musical hung from the ceiling, hooked up to some kind of rheostat that was activated, to use Schultz’s word, by the movement of the door. When I opened it further, the lights brightened, and when I pulled it toward me, they dimmed. The spots picked out various items of interest on the walls, but the first thing I saw was the throne.

  It stood on a platform with two steps leading up to it, making the whole assemblage more than seven feet high. What had once been a high-backed wooded armchair had been completely covered in gold and silver foil, with big red and yellow plastic jewels, ironic in their complete falsity, studded everywhere.

  I was staring, openmouthed, when I realized that the light hadn’t died when the door closed behind me. Another control somewhere, then, one that took charge when he surveyed his domain and opened the door all the way. With the door shut, no daylight whatsoever entered the apartment; the aluminum foil taped over the windows locked out the sun and ensured that the only light came from the system of tightly focused pinspots. The spots glowed on objects and pictures and bounced off the walls. The walls had been covered entirely in ruby-red metallic giftwrap foil. Pasted to the foil wherever the brightest spots fell were terrible things.

  The Polaroids were the worst of all. Swaddled in rags and sprawled on pavements, the Incinerator’s victims burned. Most of them had managed to sit up before the flash went off, and many of them had a flaming hand out and stretched toward the camera, a reflexive appeal for help that had been greeted by the laugh Mrs. Gottfried had described to me. There were thirteen of them
. One of them, his mouth open so far that the flash had bounced off his uvula, was clearly Abraham Winston. Another was the lady who’d wanted the bath.

  The awful Polaroids provided the only color in the collage, and they were arranged symmetrically, like the blacked-out squares in a crossword puzzle of agony. Everything else was reproduced in black-and-white, but the black-and-white was enough. A little Vietnamese girl, arms aflame, raced toward the camera of an Associated Press photographer. A burning monk tilted sideways, putting a hand—already largely bone—against the surface of the road on which he’d immolated himself. Photos of burn victims, clipped from medical texts, puffed at me like beached blowfish, their eyes receding from the world into pillows of swelling flesh. The men, women, and children who had fed the human bonfires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obediently displayed their melted backs and arms with exquisite Japanese politeness.

  It was a lot more than I could take, but it was almost harder to turn my back on it. When I did, I found myself looking at a bed and a desk. Well, okay, there was no bedroom. The bed was narrow and monastically uncomfortable, an iron frame and a thin mattress, and the desk was made from materials that reminded me of my own student days: a door over two sawhorses. This door, however, was made of metal. Stenciled onto it were the words fire door. Over the makeshift desk sagged a shelf, bowed downward in the middle, crammed every which way with books.

  All the books dealt with fire in one way or another. Gods of the Sun nestled between Franz Cumont’s The Mysteries ofMitbra and a popular history called The Fire-Bombing of Dresden. Next to that was a scientific text economically titled Combustion, and beside that was a biography of Lavoisier. Three books on Zoroaster comprised a subsection in themselves. There were at least fifty volumes in all, and they were all stolen library books.

  Pasted to the wall between the books and the desk was the Incinerator’s classical annex.

  Paintings, etchings, and engravings of all periods detailed the unhappy career of Hephaestus. A historiated initial or a fragment from a miniature cut from UCLA’s stock of illuminated manuscripts glowed here and there like a little jewel among images depicting the key moments—his being thrown from Olympus by his angry mother, Hera, revolted at her deformed offspring, the gathering of the gods to witness Hephaestus’ cuckoldry as his perfect wife, Aphrodite, writhed with Apollo on her marriage bed, the two of them trapped by a net of Hephaestus’ devising. An oddly masochistic reaction, I thought, making your cuckoldry public. Further along was Prometheus, fennel stalk in hand, creeping toward the forge as Hephaestus, wizened and tilting to one side, absently hammered at a piece of glowing iron.