Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  Praise for Timothy Hallinan and Simeon Grist

  “ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING of the new private eyes”

  Booklist

  “AN EXCELLENT JOB . . . When it comes to making a quick run up Topanga Canyon in the 1990s, Hallinan has the top down and he's ready to go.”

  Chicago Tribune

  “Effective prose, engaging repartee, sharp and witty characterizations ... Hallinan has a genuine ability.”

  Washington Post Book World

  “A generous and inventive writer ... Hallinan has talent and skill... Simeon Grist is a classic California hard-boiled detective, beautifully playing the role of knight errant.”

  Drood Review of Mystery

  “Grist bears watching ... Hallinan writes with humor and insight into the Los Angeles scene. He has a good eye for detail and accurately sketches all the scary shadows of nighttime Hollywood.”

  Los Angeles Daily News

  “Hallinan's novels are entertaining and occasionally disturbing fantasies ... HIS PROSE SPARKLES.”

  Virginian Pilot & Ledger Star

  Incinerator

  Simeon Grist Mystery #4

  Timothy Hallinan

  Hallinan Consulting, LLC

  Venice, California

  Incinerator

  Copyright © 2011 by Timothy Hallinan

  eBook ISBN-10: 0-9828302-5-4

  www.timothyhallinan.com

  eBook Digitally Published 2010 by Hallinan Consulting, LLC

  Published in the United States of America

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination of are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  “Ashes by Now,” words and music by Rodney Crowell. Copyright © 1976 Tessa Publishing Company (BMI), Administered by CMI. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Cover Design by Allen Chiu: pealwah@hotmail.com

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  eBook design by Rickhardt Capidamonte.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are overdue for the contributions made to this and previous books by Alex. G. Shulman, M.D., and William Wanamaker, M.D., whose hard-earned medical knowledge I've put to such appalling uses. It wasn't their fault. And acknowledgment, both prior and current, is also due to the person who should certainly hold the Guinness record for the world's briefest phone calls, my ever-understanding agent, Joan Brandt.

  Preface

  When you go back to a book 15 or more years after you wrote it, you can be almost objective.

  Incinerator is the fifth book in the Simeon Grist series, and I'd been writing one a year when I turned it out. The series was getting a little mechanical for me, so I decided to try something different: to talk about an unsettled incident in my own past.

  About six months before I wrote the book, I received a letter, several pages long, about how the writer had changed his approach to life, at least socially speaking, by modeling himself on me, back when we were in school together. How that change had won him friends for the first time in his life, and how he'd carried the approach over into his career, and on and on. And now he was writing a belated thank-you, just to tell me what I'd meant to him.

  I didn't recognize the writer's name.

  The incident bothered me enormously. If I had helped someone without being aware of it, were there also people I had harmed? Had I just been too self-centered even to have noticed this interaction, which was apparently quite important to the other person? Since I tend to go to the negative, the whole thing resolved itself into a single question: How many people had/have I unknowingly screwed over?

  That was the germ of the book.

  Now, all these years later, I don't think I dealt with the question very well. Still, there are things I really do like in the book, things I think are as good as anything I wrote then, and maybe as good as anything I'm writing now. I disliked the book for a while because it received my first really, really bad review, from a woman at one of the trades who just hated every syllable of it and hated me for having written it. And I'm afraid I let her color my own feelings about the book. (I actually owe her thanks because she caught a whopping factual error, which I have corrected for this edition.)

  Reading it now, I like it quite a bit. It's got its excesses, but it's got its strengths, too.

  I hope you enjoy it.

  For Pat and Mike,

  brothers and friends,

  and, still, for Munyin

  Incinerator

  part one

  IGNITION

  In the first moment all was fire, and all shall return to fire.

  —Vedic Scripture

  When we dream that we are dreaming, the moment of awakening is at hand.

  —Novalis

  1

  First Spark

  This is what it said:

  You only get to squeeze the bottle four times.

  The first two are business. You aim for the clothes.

  The third is for fun. Does he have long hair?

  You squeeze the bottle the fourth time after you wake him up, to let him in on the joke. Then you throw the match.

  As the flame rises from the offering, the gods of carrion gather like flies to wheel and circle in the smoke. But they do not come for the flame. They come for the smoke and the dirt of the offering, and the offering is carrion. The Flame purifies it.

  The only clean gods are the gods of Fire.

  Flame licks the heels of the corrupt gods and consumes their wings, and they spiral like bats into the Flame. Flame turns corruption into heat and Light. When the Earth is cleaned of its corruption, what a Light there will be. It will dim the sun.

  There is so much corruption.

  The words were written in metallic gold ink on the back of a brown square of paper cut from a supermarket shopping bag. The first letter, a capital Y, was much larger than the others, set up straight to form a twisted cross in a tiny landscape of flaming hills. At the bottom of the paper, in the same shiny gold, was a very skillful drawing of flames. Arms and legs, inked in vivid colors, protruded from the flames like bits of human barbecue in a demonic illuminated manuscript.

  The lines the words formed were painstakingly and precisely parallel. He'd kept both margins plumb-line straight. The text of the letter formed a square that could have been framed with a ruler. The paper had been folded sharply, once in each direction, and the folds intersected in the absolute heart of the square. Once folded, the letter had fitted exactly into the envelope, so tightly that I'd had to tug at it to pull it out.

  The paper smelled of gasoline.

  Three days earlier, I was relatively certain, the person who wrote the letter had poured gasoline over a sleeping drunk in a doorway somewhere in downtown L.A., and then struck a match.

  The letter was addressed to me. At home.

  Even though I'm a private detective, I did what anybody else would have done. I called the cops.

  “Why you?” Lieutenant Al Hammond asked. Actually, “asked” is a euphemism. Hammond was demanding an answer, not asking for one. He was literally bristling at me. It was a Sunday, and nowadays Hammond didn't shave on weekends. He said it was because he didn't have to, but I figured he'd read
a men's cosmetics ad that said that shaving was hard on the skin, and Hammond, recently separated from his wife and reluctantly on the loose in his middle forties, was trying to save his face for anyone who might conceivably be interested in it. Hammond was supposed to be my friend, so he was the cop I'd called. Now he glared at me over a thick, unlit cigar while the other cop in the room downtown, the fat young cop, kept his eyes demurely on the steno pad and took notes. The young cop's name was Willick.

  “Hell, Al,” I said, yet again, “I suppose it's because of the girl.”

  Willick scribbled to show how busy he was. His hair, pale and already thinning, framed a face that could have been sculpted from margarine. It melted downward, dripping a tiny, pinched nose that almost touched the upper lip of a mouth made of rubbery fat, as uneven as a discount-store gift bow. The bow had been tied over a dimpled chin that looked as if it puckered easily and a thick, soft neck. It was hot in the room, just as it was everywhere else in L.A., and sweat gleamed on Willick's forehead like congealed cholesterol.

  It wasn't hot enough, though, to melt the sliver of chill that had bisected the center of my back ever since I'd opened the letter.

  “What girl?” Hammond's eyes, on this hung-over afternoon, were an interesting two-tone scheme, brown and red.

  “We're all over the news,” I said. “Al, that's why the lunatic wrote me, if it really is the lunatic. Because of who the press is pleased to call the beautiful heiress. The newly orphaned Miss Winston.”

  The name registered, as it should have. The lady in question was no slouch at breaking print.

  “Her father,” Hammond said grudgingly, “or something like that.”

  “Something exactly like that.”

  Hammond grunted. He had a vast repertoire of grunts, an Esperanto of grunts that were equally understandable in Los Angeles, on Red Square, and in Djakarta, Indonesia. Willick unwisely attempted a matching grunt, part of his cop training. Nettled, Hammond impaled him with a red-rimmed glance and repeated, “Winston.” He was circling in on it, in his own fashion.

  “Annabelle Winston,” I said. “Her father got burned like a pile of autumn leaves right here in L.A. early Thursday morning.”

  “Hey,” Willick said, looking up from his notes as the penny dropped. “The Crisper.” At least someone on the force was interested.

  “Just write,” Hammond said shortly.

  “The Crisper,” I agreed. “The guy who's spent the last couple of months torching the folks who make Skid Row so colorful.”

  “Three months,” Hammond corrected me, to show that he was on the ball.

  “This note was from him?” Willick asked, alertly if unwisely. His raised eyebrows were engaged in a battle for territory with his hairline. They'd have won if his hairline hadn't been in such hasty retreat.

  “Is your pen out of ink?” said Hammond, curling his upper lip nastily. Hammond's upper lip got a lot of use. “Want a pencil?”

  “Sorry, Loot,” Willick said, redirecting his attention to his pad and pretending to write something.

  “Lieutenant,” Hammond corrected him.

  “Look, Loot,” I said, “this is Sunday.”

  “Jesus,” Hammond said, slamming a hand over his heart with a thump that sounded like Dumbo landing. “Glad I'm sitting down. Look, work out a signal, willya? Wave a hand or something next time you're gonna drop a bombshell.”

  “He had to deliver it himself,” I said. Hammond's expression didn't change. He still looked sour. “He had to put it into my mailbox.”

  Hammond gave me a heavy nod. “Must be why she hired you,” he said. “Brains like that. Wish we had that kind of intellect on the force.”

  “You've been to my house, Al.” Willick's eyes widened. He started to take a note, but Hammond grabbed his hand. Hammond didn't want our personal relationship on the record. “How many houses are there on my street? Five,” I answered myself, since Hammond didn't look like he wanted to play. “And it's a dead end.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Hammond said, anticipating me.

  “What I'm suggesting,” I began.

  “I said yeah,” Hammond said gruffly.

  I wanted the idea to find its way into Willick's note book, so I plowed on. “I just thought maybe it would have occurred to the LAPD to check with my neighbors, see if they saw a car they didn't recognize. One of them might even have seen the driver. Of course, this suggestion is made in all humility, from one with no experience of the inside workings of a great police force.”

  Hammond gave me a silent-movie squint that said, Don't push it. He hated it when I got ahead of him. Add that to a hangover that would have felled a twenty-mule team, and he was operating under a lot of disadvantages.

  “We're doing it,” he said, accompanying the words with a curt little gesture that told Willick to write. If they weren't doing it already, they soon would be.

  “I figured you were,” I said to pacify him.

  “Winston,” Hammond growled, giving me what was for him a gentle prompt. “I'm not exactly at my best, you know.”

  Indeed he wasn't. He'd been royally blistered the night before, which was the last time I'd seen him, and I hadn't been notably abstemious myself.

  “Abraham Winston,” I said charitably, even though Hammond's headache was no worse than mine. It couldn't have been.

  “Ex-something,” Hammond prodded me. As always, he looked as though he'd been sewn into a very large suit and then inflated like a balloon in the Macy's parade.

  “Ex-a lot of things,” I said. “Ex-Weinstein, for example. Also ex-financier, ex-entrepreneur, ex-charitable donor, ex-big deal Chicago businessman. And, until the Crisper picked him out of ten or twenty bums lining various doorways downtown, he was a present-tense alcoholic transient, and maybe someone with an advanced case of Alzheimer's disease. What do you think, Al? Is this note from the Crisper?”

  “And Baby hired you,” he said, ignoring my question in practiced cop style and giving the lady the name the tabloids had saddled her with since she was fifteen. He already knew she had; he was just keeping the conversation going while he waited for some of his brain cells to come back from vacation.

  “Baby did,” I said. “Baby Winston, Annabelle Winston.”

  “And that was a big flash here in L.A.,” Hammond said. “Hold the presses.”

  “Slow news day,” I said, “plus big money. Baby Winston paid a lot of money, a whole lot of money, Al, to some PR man who called a press conference to announce that the L.A. cops couldn't do the job and so she'd hired the guy who just broke up the big, mean kiddie prostitution ring. Meaning me. And the TV stations ran the story, and the papers printed my name, and that's why the Crisper wrote me the letter. If it really was the Crisper. It wasn't my idea that she should go to the press, and you damn well know it. I had no idea she was going to do it.”

  Hammond rested his heavy head in his hands, breaking his cigar on the point of his chin, and burped. Blanching, Willick watched one of his idols hike his cuffs to reveal clay, cop-sized feet. “Okay,” Hammond said without looking up, “let's take it from the beginning.”

  2

  Annabelle

  “My father was a great man,” Annabelle Winston had said on the preceding day.

  There's not much you can say when someone tells you her father was a great man. For one thing, she's almost always wrong. Baby Winston being Baby Winston, though, I'd tried to look interested.

  It wasn't just that Baby was the best-dressed woman I'd ever seen, which she probably was, or the best-looking, which she wasn't. My ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, was better looking. But combine the second-best-looking woman I'd ever seen with the best-dressed, and you had, as a friend of mine named Dexter Smif might have said, powerful juju. And so I sat there and wondered what the point was.

  She was wearing a hand-sewn silk suit that was greener than the Sargasso Sea. The combination of the suit plus her reddish hair and perfectly white skin was what the people who designed the Italia
n flag had been trying for. Under the reddish hair was a broad, unlined forehead and a pair of eyebrows that tilted up at the ends. The eyebrows set the stage for wide-spaced gray eyes as reflective and as communicative as a cop's sunglasses. There was a nice little accidental bump, like a glitch in an otherwise perfect blueprint, on the bridge of her nose, and she wore one superfluous layer of dark lipstick. The lipstick redefined the shape of a mouth that had been just fine as it was. In all, she was the most tightly wrapped human being I'd ever met. If I'd had to guess an age, I'd have said thirty-two.

  “So this is about your father,” I said at last, sounding to myself like a shrink who was in the wrong line of work.

  She took a breath and then blew it out without putting words in front of it. The suite in which she'd set up camp was one of the Bel Air Hotel's best, full of hand-carved rosewood furniture, Chinese antiques, and a baby grand, perched on a carpet deep enough to lose your keys in. It had a name on the door rather than a number.