“The world’s first grocery museum. The last, too, I suppose. And I was the curator.”
“You must have loved him very much.”
She stubbed out the unsmoked cigarette. “Don’t make me get up again,” she said. “He’s still alive, for the moment, at least. I still love him. How could I not love him? This was a man who bought a hundred Christmas trees every year, and all the presents under them, and had them delivered to poor families in Chicago. And he was a Jew, for Christ’s sake.”
“How did he know what to buy?” I asked, fascinated in spite of myself.
“He hired Santas and put them into the worst neighborhoods. The Santas had big bellies with little tape recorders hidden in them. After they talked to a particularly sweet little kid, the Santas were supposed to ask them their full names and where they lived. On Christmas Eve, Daddy or one of his Christmas crews would show up, all dressed like Santa, with the whole shebang. The tree, all the presents the kid had asked for, something practical for the parents. He made a ceremony of telling Mommy and me about it the next morning. Christmas morning. He’d drink his eggnog with cognac and tell us about Christmas Eve. That was our Christmas. Hearing Daddy talk about what happened after they knocked on the doors in their red suits and their white beards, and what the people said and how the kids acted. It was the kids who got to him. Sometimes he cried like a baby. They really killed him. Oh, Lord,” she said, getting up again. “Oh, Lord. Just sit there and don’t say anything.”
She had her back turned to me, her shoulders stiff and high. I tried not to say anything and failed. “You never got anything for Christmas?”
“My whole life was Christmas,” she said without turning around. “I was Santa’s daughter. I was one of the elves.” She lowered her head, and her shoulders began to shake.
She needed something to do. “I’d like another beer,” I said.
Annabelle caught her breath with a rasping sound. “Easily arranged,” she said. She was herself again, or close enough to fool someone who wasn’t paying attention. “This is the last, I think. Shall I call down for more?” She went to the bar and opened the door of the refrigerator.
“This is it. I’ve got an evening in front of me.”
“Lucky you,” she said. “I’ve got a sleeping pill.” I would have traded my evening for her sleeping pill. It was nothing I looked forward to. She uncapped the beer, reached for a glass, dropped the cap into the wastebasket with a metallic ping of precision, blinked, and said, “So we got Harvey, and Harvey took him to the store every morning. That was Harvey’s whole job. Not such a hard job, would you think? And one day Harvey didn’t come back, and neither did Daddy. We hired the world to find him. Hundreds of people. Then I got the call from L.A. saying some bum has been burned half to death and he’s got a MedicAlert bracelet, the bracelet Daddy wore because of the Alzheimer’s, identifying him as Abraham Winston. Do I think the bracelet might have been stolen? Well, I don’t know where Daddy is, so my first impulse was to believe that the bracelet was wherever he was. And I came here, and it took me an hour to recognize him. He didn’t look like Santa Claus any more.”
She sat down on the couch, and both she and the upholstery sighed. The bottle trembled in her hand. “Will you help me?”
“I thought we’d settled that,” I said. “I’m going to try.”
“Oh,” she said, and she leaned forward until her forehead touched her knees. “Oh.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Was his face burned?”
“No,” Baby Winston said, without straightening. “Only the lower two thirds of his body. But they were third-degree burns.” She was talking to her lap.
“Then why did it take you an hour to recognize him?”
She remained folded forward, tighter than a jackknife. “Let’s hope you never have to find out,” she said.
3
Al the Red
That evening I had a prearranged date with Hammond. The bar called the Red Dog glares out onto a block of Hollywood Boulevard that only the most foolhardy walk at night-the most foolhardy and cops. Not that the two categories are mutually exclusive.
The Red Dog has a corny sawdust floor and a sixties jukebox, recycling hits from the Summer of Love at numbing volume. The latest hits reach cops last, and it’s probably a good thing. Otherwise they’d be able to figure out what the rest of us are up to.
Hammond had a red kerchief tied crookedly around his head when I walked in. It wasn’t a good sign. His broad face, shadowed with a day’s worth of whiskers, gleamed with sweat and malice, and he had a drink in each of his ham-sized hands.
“God damn,” he said. He darted a glance at me and missed by about a yard. “I was afraid I’d have to drink both of these.”
“What a fate,” I said, taking the nearer of the two. It was sweating more heavily than Hammond. After all the beer I didn’t want it, but it seemed like good policy to slow Hammond down. “Nice hat, Al.”
“I’m a pirate,” he announced vehemently. “Al the Red.” He looked around for someone to contradict him.
“Shiver me timbers. Where’s your parrot?” The whiskey tasted like recycled perspiration: flat, malodorous, and for some reason slightly salty.
“Don’t need no fucking parrot. Parrots got lice.”
“That a fact?”
“Every parrot I ever knew. Al the Red is a bad guy, but he doesn’t have lice. Lice, they’ll eat your peg leg right out from under you.”
“I thought that was termites.”
“Termites eat houses,” Hammond said with leaden patience. “Lice eat peg legs. Termites I got. They ate my whole fucking house already.”
“Al,” I said as gently as possible. “You’ve still got your house.”
“Who said anything about houses?” Hammond asked belligerently. “Al the Red lives on a ship.” He tugged the kerchief to a more rakish angle. “What the fuck good is a house? Can you take it anywhere? Huh? Can you sail your house into a harbor and fire cannons at the civilians?” He drained his drink, leaned toward me, and tapped the back of my hand meaningfully. It felt like a hammer. His eyes narrowed. “Can a house do twenty knots?”
It was going to be a long night.
“Where’s your crew?” I asked, and instantly kicked myself under the table. It was the wrong thing to ask.
“Deserted,” Red Al said. “Every man jack of them. Every woman jack, too. Desertion. That’s the trouble with houses. They’re too easy to leave.” His eyes closed heavily, and he rested his big forehead on the rim of his glass. I glanced around for help and didn’t find any. Cops avoided my eyes. Our table reminded me of the drop of penicillin in the center of a petri dish: The area around it was a vacuum, vacated by the swarms who had withdrawn to the walls, cops and cop groupies carrying on earnest conversations over the din of the music- by now it was Sly amp; the Family Stone. I searched for the black cop who might have dropped that particular quarter and didn’t find him. He was hiding. Like everybody else.
Hammond lifted his head. The circular impression of the glass was printed on his forehead, like a target. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth, and bellowed, “PEPPI!”
Peppi, the barmaid, was as butch as Hammond but a lot smaller. I’d never been sure which of the two I’d rather fight. She materialized at a safe distance from the table and said, “Yeah?” She’d traded in her trademark black net stockings for a pair of silvery Spandex tights under six inches of black cloth. It hadn’t been a wise fashion decision. From the waist down, she looked like two fish trapped in a miniskirt.
“Al the Red is thirsty,” Hammond said in an eminently reasonable tone of voice. “So is his first mate.”
“Comin’ up.” Peppi wheeled to go, and Hammond leaned forward and grabbed a fistful of her short skirt. Peppi stopped shorter than a fishing weight at the end of a snarled line. “Hey,” she snarled.
“Peppi,” Hammond said. “Tell you what. Make a woman of you.”
“I’ve alread
y taken that course,” Peppi said. “I changed majors.”
“Try a real man,” Hammond said. He gave her a lop sided leer.
“Find one,” Peppi said, tugging her skirt free with red-knuckled hands. “Just find one.”
Hammond directed his gaze toward her silver knees and winked appreciatively. He was even drunker than I’d thought. “Great gams,” he said inaccurately.
“You,” Peppi said, looking at me. “You. First mate.”
I looked up.
“Take care of him,” she said.
“Me?” Hammond said, pounding the table with a fist slightly smaller than West Virginia. “Take care of Al the Red? Nobody born can take care of Al the Red.”
“Yeah,” said Peppi, who had never liked me. “That’s why I picked him.”
Hammond gave up. “Grog,” he said. “Posthaste.” Peppi marched off, and he looked up at me balefully, “Am I making an asshole of myself?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, fuck it,” he said. “And fuck you, too, while I’m at it. I won’t remember in the morning. Funny what you remember and what you forget.”
I agreed that it was funny and then tried to do some business.
“Listen,” I shouted over Gary Lewis and the Playboys or someone like that, “what do you know about this guy who’s setting fire-”
“The paper plates,” Hammond said. “Did I tell you about the paper plates?”
I shelved my question and shook my head. The paper plates were a new wrinkle.
“I get home,” Hammond said, taking the glass from my hand and draining it in a single gulp, “and the door’s open.” He looked down at the two empty glasses in front of him. “Where’s the goddamn grog?”
“Coming.”
“That’s what’s wrong with grog. It takes too long. I don’t know how Francis Drake did it, waiting all day for his fucking grog. Do you think Francis Drake ever got home and found the door open?”
“No,” I said. “His boat would have sunk.”
Hammond licked a finger and made an imaginary mark in the air. “One for you,” he said. “Problem was, I was living in a house, not a boat. I mean, what’s it supposed to sink into, the lawn? Nothing ever sank into a lawn.”
“Newspapers do. Every morning.”
“So I get home,” he said, ignoring me, “maybe eleven o’clock, maybe later. I mean, I’d been out drinking, but nothing new. Did it every night. Same as you. Everybody does.”
So far, except for the paper plates, we were on familiar territory. Everybody didn’t, of course, but most cops did. They had to. Whiskey was the anesthetic that made it possible for them to get home and pretend for their children’s sake that the world was sane.
“And the door’s open.” Hammond belched. “There’s light pouring through the door. Hazel never left the lights on. She’s the original Scrooge McDuck. She thinks every time she turns off a light it’s a hundred in the bank. All for little Al’s college.”
I thought about Annabelle Winston and the twelve cents per can and kept my mouth shut.
“But that night it’s like she’s watering the lawn with light,” he said. “So I did what anybody would do. I grabbed a. 45 and headed for the front door. Have I told you this before?”
“No,” I lied.
“Good. I may be an asshole, but I don’t want to be boring. So I hold my breath and kick the front door the rest of the way open. God only knows what I expected to find. A bunch of fundamentalist towel-heads maybe, or the Mansonoids who got away.” Like most cops, Hammond believed that the majority of the Manson Family, or, for that matter, Butch Cassidy’s gang, were still on the loose. “And there’s nothing inside, and I mean nothing. It looked like a surgery room. Where’s that goddamn grog?”
“Behind you,” Peppi said. She plunked down a couple of glasses that held, conservatively, triples.
“About time, too,” Hammond said. “Next time I’ll have my parrot make it.” Peppi gave me a concerned look and headed for the relative security of the bar.
Hammond hoisted his drink and knocked back half of it. I drank most of mine and put the rest closer to him. He’d drink it eventually. The whiskey sang off-key in my veins. He hunched his massive shoulders up around his ears, making his neck disappear completely, and said, “A moving van. She hired a fucking moving van. All that was left was my chair, the stuff in my den, and a couple guns. Hazel never liked the guns. Also my bed. Did I tell you we slept in twin beds?”
“Better that way,” I said. “Women have cold feet.”
“Hazel has feet like the polar ice cap. It was like sleeping with Greenland.” He finished his drink and stared at what was left of mine. I put it into his hand.
“Not drinking?” he said. He didn’t really care.
“I already had a few.”
“Who was buying?”
“Client.”
“Anything for the cops?”
“Yeah. About this pyromaniac who’s torching the homeless.”
I might as well have been Demosthenes at the seaside, waiting for applause from the waves. Hammond’s kerchief had slipped down over his left eye, and he tugged it upward. “Where’d this come from?” he asked, looking up at it.
“Al the Red,” I said, abandoning the topic. “Scourge of the Caribbean.”
“Bet your ass,” he said. “There’s not a palm tree safe.”
“Well, what are they good for anyway?”
“Target practice.” He made a pistol out of his hand, sighted over it, and said, “KABOOM!” People gave us nervous looks. It takes a lot to make a roomful of drunk cops nervous, but whatever it takes, Hammond had it.
He blew on his fingers to disperse the smoke. “She took the kids, of course,” he said.
“She would,” I said. “She’s their mother.”
“Yeah?” he said. “What’m I, an unindicted coconspirator?” He drained the drink and signaled for two more.
We’d had this discussion before. “You said something about paper plates,” I said.
“Wrapped in cellophane.” He closed his eyes for a long time, and I hoped he’d gone to sleep. “With little blue flowers on them,” he added, eyes still shut. “On the sink, right where the real plates would have been if she hadn’t taken them. My mother gave us those plates. Did I tell you my mother’s on Hazel’s side?”
Peppi clunked a couple of drinks onto the table, and Hammond opened his eyes and put four ounces of whiskey into the realm of memory. I took a whack off the other one. I was getting drunk.
“So what was I supposed to think?” he asked me.
I’m not a guesser. I wouldn’t guess my own weight if I were standing on a scale. So I just said, “What?”
“I figured it was like she was tipping me a wink,” he said, sighting me through the bottom of the whiskey tumbler and looking like a middle-aged pirate with a truncated spyglass. “It was like she was saying, Hey, I’ve taken the kids and the furniture, but I’m still worried about what you’re going to eat and what you’re going to eat it off of. You can still get us back. I was alone in the house, it was the middle of the night and the house was empty, but there were these paper plates, and I looked at them like they were the fucking Holy Grail and figured she’s pissed off but we can straighten it out. We always did before.”
“Good for her,” I said. It was my turn to wave for Peppi. Peppi shook her head meaningfully and looked away. “That’s a woman for you,” I added, flagging Peppi again. “Sentimental.”
Peppi poured and trudged grudgingly toward us. She didn’t look sentimental. She looked like a woman with a rattlesnake in her hip pocket.
“Except it wasn’t,” Hammond said as the drinks landed loudly on the table.
“What wasn’t?” I asked. To Peppi, I said, “Two more.” I was tired of waving.
“You’re driving,” Peppi said unpleasantly. Peppi had unpleasant down cold.
“Aren’t you listening?” Hammond said to me. “Plates. We’re talking about
paper plates. I sit around for eight days going out of my mind. I’m trying to pick the tattoos off my arms. There’s no note, no phone number, no nothing. I go to the assholes in Missing Persons and they laugh in my face. Guys I know, for Christ’s sake. Every morning I wait for the mailman, catch hell because I’m coming in late. No letter. No birthday card, even.”
“Happy Birthday” didn’t seem like the right thing to say. I drank instead.
“And then her sister calls me,” he said as Peppi plunked the full glasses on the table. For once, Hammond didn’t give them a glance. He still had half a belt in his hand. “Her sister. Zora, for Christ’s sake. I’ve only called the bitch forty or fifty times since Hazel left, and it’s always ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about it. How terrible for you.’ So Hazel finally lets go of her sister’s leash, and the bitch calls me and says everybody’s okay.
“ ‘Everybody who?’ I say. ‘I’m not okay. I seen DOAs who are more okay than I am.’ And she laughs this pissy little laugh and says, honest to Christ, Simeon, she says, ‘Oh, you men. You don’t know when you’re well off.’
“ ‘Well off,’ I say. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
“ ‘Hazel told me how you swore,’ she says. ‘I must say, it’s not very becoming. Not in a grown man, anyway.’ ” Hammond finally registered the new drinks. He finished the one in his hand.
“Drink, me hearty,” said Al the Red, hoisting the fuller of the two new ones.
I drank. The room was beginning to waver as though I were seeing it over an active radiator.
“Well off?” I asked.
“Sure,” Hammond said in a voice that would have straightened the hair on a sheep. “After I apologized for my French and asked her real polite and genteel where they all were and she said she couldn’t tell me, then she said, and listening to it would have given Liberace diabetes, she said, ‘Wasn’t it sweet of little Al to go out and buy you those paper plates? He wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.’ ” He lowered his head onto his bulging forearms. “Little Al,” he repeated. “Holy Jesus, little Al.”
Without thinking, I reached over and put my hand on top of his head. Sober, he’d have killed me. “Hey, Al the Red,” I said, “let’s go home.”
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