Incinerator sg-4

by Timothy Hallinan

  She tapped the cigarette into the ashtray at precisely the right moment. Another second, and ash would have tumbled into her lap. “My father was Abraham Winston, once.” A minor chord sounded in her voice, and I recognized it as fierceness. “When he was still Abraham Winston, he built a dirty little grocery store in the poorest, blackest part of Chicago into a chain of sixty-two supermarkets. Then he decided to make some real money. He bought up the ranches that supplied the meat and the farms that supplied the produce. He bought canning factories and dairies. He owned the companies that made the paper for the shopping bags that women put his vegetables and meat and milk into. He was a man who liked to own things.”

  “When did he stop being Abraham Winston?”

  “Not all at once,” she said. Then she closed the gray eyes for a second. When she opened them, they were clear and dry. “Drink your beer. And I’ve changed my mind, which was supposed to be a woman’s prerogative, back when women still had them.” She gave me the wisp of a smile.

  She got up and went again to the bar, where she poured a finger of bourbon into a heavy cut-glass tumbler. She lifted the glass in a mock toast and drank all the whiskey at once. Her throat hardly moved. Even Hammond would have been impressed.

  “He went into commodities after my mother died,” she said, pouring another. “That was three years ago. He’d done most of what he did for her, my analyst says, and she wasn’t around anymore. I guess the satisfaction of it died when she did. And there wasn’t a son, of course.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” I swallowed some beer, just to be polite. Okay, that’s a lie. I needed it.

  “Well, there wasn’t. There was only me. Only Baby.” She pronounced her nickname with the kind of venom one associates with the more effective Islamic curses. “Not that any of this matters now. I was enough, as it turned out. But after she, meaning Mommy, was gone, it wasn’t enough for him to own everything in the present tense. He had to have a piece of the future, too. That way, you see, he could own time. Time was his enemy. It had given him almost everything he ever wanted, thought he wanted, anyway, and then it took away his reason for having wanted it in the first place. Mommy, I mean. Leaving only a few hundred million dollars and me.” She emitted a short, ugly laugh and took a swallow, a sip this time, from her glass.

  “And?”

  “And what?” She arched an eyebrow. A single eye brow; more economy. Whatever it was that was going on inside, it needed most of her energy. “There are a million ways I could answer that.”

  “So choose the one that appeals to you.”

  She lifted the green silk shoulders a quarter of an inch and let them fall again. “Do you know much about commodities?”

  “I don’t even know what they are.” I pulled at the beer again.

  She was leaning against the bar with both elbows. It was supposed to look relaxed. “They’re futures, bets against the future. Choose an item, pork bellies or platinum or September wheat, and bet which way the prices are going to go x number of months from now. Rise or fall, it doesn’t make any difference, as long as you bet right. Bet right, you make a million dollars.”

  “Bet wrong and you eat the big patootie,” I ventured, drinking again.

  “This is a small part of the story,” she said, straightening up. “I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

  “You said a hundred an hour to talk,” I said. “I’m not getting fidgety.”

  “Good. I want you to understand.” She took another judicious sip. “You don’t like me.”

  It was my turn to shrug. “Your father apparently got burned pretty badly two days ago. Without any attempt to be offensive, you don’t seem exactly desolate.”

  “I haven’t the time to be desolate,” she said. “I told you there wasn’t a son. I’m it. I’m Winston Enterprises.” She tossed a hand toward the briefcases as though several thousand tiny employees were slaving busily away inside them. “I’ve got too much to do to be desolate, or to waste the day trying to make you like me. All I want to do is sell you on helping me.”

  “Sell me?”

  “You’re stubborn, they told me,” she continued. “They told me that you worked on that case with the little kids even after you lost your client. ‘He has to be interested,’ they said.” She tapped out a military drumroll on her glass with the formidable fingernails.

  “Who are they? ” I asked. “And why not hire them?”

  She put the glass against her cheek as though it cooled her, although she looked cool enough already. “Who says I haven’t?”

  I looked at my watch. “Call it an hour,” I said, putting down the beer and getting up. “You can mail the check.”

  “Sit down.” She pointed to the couch with the hand holding the glass. The glass was heavy, but it was a truly imperial gesture, a gesture that belonged to the days of the Holy Roman Empire.

  I stayed on my feet. “Skip it. I have a policy. It’s called staying alive. And it means that I don’t get involved if anyone else is.”

  “And why not?”

  “Fuckups,” I said. “If anyone’s going to fuck up, it’s going to be me. At least that way I know there’s been a fuckup.”

  What she did with her face wasn’t exactly a smile, but it was the closest thing I’d seen in a few minutes. “That’s a good answer,” she said. “A good business answer.”

  “Thanks. Call me after you fire them.”

  “I haven’t hired them. I didn’t say I’d hired them. I said, Who says I haven’t.”

  “Eleven hundred and thirty-two,” I said. I was still standing.

  “What?”

  “That’s how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Medieval theological mystery. ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ The answer is eleven hundred and thirty-two. Exactly. Anyone gives you a different number, he’s wrong. Or, on the other hand, maybe he’s lying. Or maybe I’m wrong. Trouble is, who can tell the difference?”

  “There isn’t anybody else.” The imperial gesture had been a dud, so she reversed tactics. She went to the couch herself and sat down, going for submissive instead. She was surprisingly good at it. She gazed up at me, looking like the Little Match Girl with only one match left.

  “Is there going to be?”

  A minute shake of the head. “Not as long as you’re on the job.” She stretched out a green silk arm and patted the couch next to her, and I sat back down. How often do you get a chance to say yes to silk?

  “I’m insulated,” she said, putting a hand on my wrist. “It’s the nature of money. I can’t help it.” This time both eyebrows went up to show me how insulated she was and how much she couldn’t help it. “Everybody pretends he wants something different, except that it always comes down to the same thing. Money. Please. Please, Mr. Grist. What was I supposed to do?”

  I sighed. “Nobody else is on the job.”

  “Nobody.” Her fingers tightened on my wrist as though she were afraid I was going to run. I couldn’t tell whether the gesture was a real impulse or just the next card off the top of the deck. She seemed to have the fullest deck this side of Las Vegas.

  “Nobody except the entire LAPD,” I said.

  “Them,” she said dismissively. “How long has this been going on? Five people are already dead. Burned to death on the sidewalk, for God’s sake. If it hadn’t been for an old lady, my father would be dead now, too. What does it take to get their attention? If somebody set up Auschwitz on Sixth Street, it would be a year before they noticed, as long as nobody respectable got burned. When you talk to them, if you have to, they won’t know what you’re talking about. The case doesn’t matter to them. The homeless don’t pay taxes.”

  She released my wrist and gave me a full-bore twelve-gauge gaze.

  “Will you do it?” she said.

  My wrist felt cool now that her hand was gone. I rubbed it once and then reached over and picked up the beer. I hadn’t decided, but I was open to persuasion. Fire is an awful way to die.

 
“Tell me what happened to him,” I said. “Not how he got burned, but-”

  “Commodities,” she said promptly. “I suppose that was the first thing. He ate enough of the-what did you call it?”

  “The big patootie.”

  “Enough of the big patootie to make him feel mortal. Financially mortal, at any rate. He’d been feeling personally mortal ever since my mother died, but that was the first time he’d been wrong in a business sense. He dropped about seven million pretax dollars.”

  I probably winced.

  “He didn’t say anything at the time-he never said much about anything that was bothering him.” She settled herself further into the cushions and clinked her glass against mine.

  Obediently, I drank. I felt like a good puppy.

  “My father believed in good news or no news where his family was concerned,” she said. “He was the wall around us. The Great Wall of the Winstons.” She put the glass down, and I swallowed some beer. “But he began to drink more than his usual one or two cognacs after dinner, and he started putting in fourteen-hour days instead of his usual twelve, and about a month later he had a stroke. Such a calm word, stroke. It sounds like something you do to a cat.”

  The best thing I could think of was to take another sip of beer. She did the same with her whiskey and then poured more. She’d brought the bottle to the table.

  “Nothing serious,” she continued. “Completely reversible. That’s what the doctors said, reversible.” Her voice could have grated Mozzarella. “But what does reversible mean? He got back his speech and the use of his legs, but he was older. He started to dodder. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded and drank.

  Annabelle Winston gave me the agate-gray eyes, full-on. “So that was when I began to get involved, not that I wanted to. I had to. I wasn’t the son he’d been supposed to have, and he wasn’t the kind of man who could hide his disappointment that I wasn’t, but there wasn’t anything else he could do. It was me or some accountant. He chose me.” She sounded like an abandoned child. I took refuge in my glass.

  “And I did what I could,” she added, ignoring my reaction. “It was a big business, about three hundred million a year at the time, and I set out to learn it the same way I’d learned my ABCs. First you memorize, and then you try to use what you’ve learned. I was up to about D when he had the second stroke, and he had the third one six hours later. He hadn’t even left the hospital.”

  She stretched out long, thin, elegantly articulated fingers and used them to rub her eyes. “This is his story,” she said, “not mine. Winston Enterprises was-is-a conglomerate, and it was more complicated than world-class Parcheesi. Still, you have to understand something about me. I sat next to him, on a chair next to his bed with a dopey schoolgirl’s pad and a cheap ballpoint pen in my hand, locking my ankles together for months, bleeding him dry. He couldn’t see my ankles. I couldn’t let him see them. If he’d seen them, they would have been a dead giveaway. If he’d seen them, he would have stopped talking. I was too anxious, and my ankles gave it away. So I kept them under the bed. I couldn’t let him stop talking, I had to understand what was what and what was where. There’s no dramatic punch line here. The ankles were my problem.”

  She took another belt of whiskey, and I snuck a look at her ankles. They weren’t locked together. “He got more and more vague,” she said over the rim of her glass. “He stopped caring if they shaved him in the morning. He began to call me by my mother’s name.” She paused again, looking at the pattern cut into the glass. “Then he began to call me Joshua.”

  “Who’s Joshua?” The sun was doing a depressive slant through the windows, and I’d stopped counting the hours, even at a hundred dollars per. She hadn’t gotten up to turn on the lights, and the tasteful rosewood furniture was beginning to disappear into the walls.

  “There wasn’t any Joshua,” she said in a muffled voice. “Joshua was the name he and my mother had chosen for me if I’d been a boy.”

  I waited for another piece of upholstery to fade and listened to my watch ticking. “He invented a son,” I said to animate the silence.

  “He reeled in the past,” she said, “and cast it out again, and when his hook came back to him, it had an imaginary son at the end of it.”

  “You.”

  “You can’t imagine how I hated it. ‘Joshua this, Joshua that,’ he’d say. ‘Joshua guard the money.’ I mean, I answered to the name anyway, but I went to bed every night and before I fell asleep, I killed the brother I’d never had, over and over and over again. God, if you could be punished for imaginary murder.” She drained the whiskey.

  “You can’t. Except in your imagination.” I held out my empty glass, and she took it.

  “If you could, my father would have outlived me,” she said. She seemed to have forgotten that she was about to make the economical trip to the bar. “There I sat at his bed, me, Joshua Winston, learning the business.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She gazed at me, gray-eyed, through the gloom for so long that it made me feel uncomfortable. “Are you,” she finally said, almost grudgingly. “Yes, maybe you are.” She got up at last.

  “Miss Winston. I may not be rich, but I’ve got parents.”

  “You’re an actual person,” she said, halfway to the bar. “Aren’t you?”

  “On my better days.”

  Stopping, she treated me to another mini-nod. “So he got worse,” she said. The bar gave her a silent hello, and she ignored it. “The ludicrous thing was that he got stronger physically as he got weaker mentally,” she said, both glasses, hers and mine, in hand. “After the second series of strokes he could barely lift an arm, but his mind was sharp. Later, when his mind was going, his body came back to him. Toward the end, he could have qualified for the Olympic hurdles, but he couldn’t have found the starting line.” She covered the rest of the distance to the bar in the same straight, economical course; Columbus had sailed that straight for the Indies, steering dead-on for China. Of course, he hadn’t known that a continent had drifted into his way. Something very large had obviously drifted into Annabelle Winston’s way.

  “Therefore, the male nurse,” I said as she poured.

  “Harvey Melnick,” she said, “may his soul roast.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Who knows? Somebody with a resume. Big, which was important because, like I said, Daddy was strong. One gold earring. The earring should have told me.” She hoisted both glasses to show me they were full, navigated the room, and sat on the couch.

  “There’s nothing you can do about it now.” I took the beer away from her.

  “I need your skills,” Annabelle Winston said in a brittle voice. Her body had gone rigid, and she sat back. “I don’t need your comfort.”

  “Hey,” I said, “we’re both real people.”

  She stood up suddenly and turned away from me. She didn’t go anywhere. She just stood there with her back to me while the light waned and the Bel Air’s highly paid birds twittered and whistled outside. “Excuse me,” she finally said.

  “Excused. Take your time.”

  “There isn’t time,” she said. “I want the shithead nailed.” Her back was as rigid as rigor mortis.

  “Despite the gold earring, you hired Harvey,” I said to her back. Then I reached out and tugged at her arm.

  She swiveled as though her arm were a rope and she were a floating boat at its other end. There was moisture on her face. “Daddy needed someone twenty-four hours a day,” she said defensively. “At night, we could use women. In the daytime, we needed a man.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted to go to the store.” Slowly, grudgingly, she sat down beside me.

  I listened to the words again, sifting them for sense. “What store?”

  “The first one.” She gave her cheeks a proprietary little wipe. “The little grocery store. We’d sold it years ago, of course. He’d wake up in the morning saying he’d forgotten to take inve
ntory. Inventory, inventory. He had to count the cans, he said. Every can of soup was twelve cents in profit. By then he was worth maybe four hundred million dollars. He’d lost all that. Mentally, I mean. He was back in the time when every twelve cents could be squirreled away for little Joshua’s education. He kept talking about the day he’d be able to buy my mother a fur coat. ‘She should be wrapped in fur,’ he said. When my mother died, we had an apartment with a walk-in freezer that was used for nothing but to store her fur coats. My mother had more fur coats than the Russian imperial family.”

  “So Harvey took him to the store every day,” I said. “But there wasn’t any store.”

  “I bought one.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She took another cigarette from the box and lit it. “I bought a store. The one he’d started in was gone, but I bought one near it. In a black area, just like the first one. It opened at nine, about half an hour before my father arrived. It closed half an hour after he finished taking inventory, the minute we knew he was around the corner. We never sold anything, of course. I wrote it off as a business loss. The IRS never asked a question. Anyway, the costs were nothing. All we ever really needed was someone to dust the cans and replace the meat and vegetables once in a while. After we gave them away.”

  “Why didn’t you leave it open? Sell stuff?”

  “His inventory would have been off,” she said. “He had an inventory from some day in the past, a Tuesday or whatever, stuck in his head like Moses’ tablets. At first we operated it like a real store. We bought and sold. But he got so upset because the numbers didn’t work out that one day he knocked everything off the shelves and sat in one of the aisles, crying. That night I made him write the whole inventory down. It took hours, but I didn’t mind because it was like being with my father again, before… well, before. He remembered everything, every tiny detail. After he went to sleep, we worked all night to stock that store. By the time he arrived the next morning, the inventory matched. I’d made goddamn sure it matched. We kept it that way for more than a year.”

  “A museum.”