Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Drink?” she offered, backing away from whatever she had been going to say. It was about noon.

  “I'll wait. What about your father?”

  She gave me the gray eyes. “He was set on fire here,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Day before yesterday.”

  “Love a drink,” I said. “What have you got?”

  “Absinthe to Sambucco,” she said. There was no feminine litter in the suite, no open suitcases, no little silver picture frames, nothing personal at all: just two open lizard-skin briefcases full of tidy, sharp-edged manila folders. Unruly papers were not permitted to peep out of the folders. One of the cases was on the table in front of me. The other was on the piano.

  “How about a beer?” She followed my gaze and closed the briefcase protectively to prevent me from exercising my X-ray vision on the manila. Her nail polish looked like Chinese lacquer, and it matched her lipstick. Like the lipstick, it was too dark, and the nails were a quarter-inch too long. Whatever she did, she didn't do her own plumbing.

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever's on hand.” Singha, from Thailand, was too much to hope for.

  “Would you like a Singha?” she asked, snapping the latch on the briefcase closed like someone arming a land mine. “From Thailand?” She didn't even smile.

  She had my attention. “You have no idea how much I know about you,” she said in the same even voice. “You're easy.”

  There were two things I wanted to do: get up and leave. I did neither. “And you've been spending money.” I glanced around the room. “Where's the beer?”

  “On ice,” she said, “like my father.” The sentence couldn't have been flatter if a grammarian had ironed it. .

  “If you don't mind, I think I'd like the beer before we get to your father.”

  She got up from the couch, a green steel bouquet on the move, and crossed the beige suite to the discreet wet bar in the fewest possible number of steps. A straight line from point to point. She was the kind of trim that you don't get for free. Air-conditioning thrummed a muted bass chord, filtering out the blistering October heat and the acrid stench of smoke from the burning hills. They call October in L.A. “the fire season.” It's a euphemism. A bad October, and this was a very bad one, is a month of fearsome, random firefall: Black ashes flutter down from the sky, to paraphrase Dickens, like snowflakes gone into mourning for the death of the sun.

  Except that in L.A., we get the sun, too, drying the air and driving the winds, fierce Santa Ana winds that clear the smog and then fan the flames to spread dark streaks of smudge across the skies like finger marks on a wall. In October the pool cleaners of Beverly Hills work overtime, straining ashes from the surface of placid blue water.

  Annabelle Winston pressed a cold bottle of Singha into my hand and sat down beside me. “Drink it,” she said in a voice that brooked no objection, “and then we'll talk.”

  “You're not having anything?”

  “No,” she said. “I don't need it.” She used the tip of one of those nails to remove an imaginary fleck of something from the corner of her mouth. The mouth was her problem, from an aesthetic perspective. With a little less lipstick and a little more smile, it would have been quite a mouth.

  “I'm not exactly sure I need it either,” I said. “I want it, since you offered, but when I need it, I'll probably quit.”

  “What I need,” she said, all focus, “is a detective. I've chosen you.”

  I sighed. “Set on fire,” I said.

  She gave a tiny nod. Nothing changed in her eyes. She kept all her movements small, as though she were conserving her energy for whatever was going on inside.

  “Still alive?”

  Annabelle Winston twirled a ring on her right hand. The stone was an emerald. “In a matter of speaking,” she said, looking down at the ring. Emeralds are basically corundum, same as sapphires and rubies, but even more expensive. She regarded it as though she were trying to figure out why it was green, rather than blue or red.

  “What does that mean?”

  She turned the stone inward and closed her hand over it protectively. “It means his vital signs are being monitored and, to whatever extent it's possible, maintained. It means they're pumping fluids into him to keep him peeing because that means his life isn't evaporating faster than he can replenish it. That's what happens when our skin is gone, you know. We evaporate. I don't suppose that's common knowledge, is it? They've put a plastic shell above him, like the spatter shield over a salad bar, to slow the evaporation.” She looked at the stone folded into her palm as though she could see through her fingers, using the other hand to pick at the corner of her mouth again, although she knew nothing was there. “It means that one or two days and a few hundred thousand dollars from now, he'll be dead.” Except for the nervous finger at her lips, there was still no sign of emotion.

  “Where did it happen?”

  Now she looked at me. “Skid Row.”

  “Miss Winston,” I said, “if you can afford this suite, why was your father on Skid Row?”

  “Why was he in Los Angeles, you mean,” she said. She picked up a black lacquered box and took out a cigarette, then lit it with a filigreed gold lighter. The hand was as steady as a dial tone. Belatedly, she offered me one. I shook my head. I wanted one, but I'd quit again.

  She turned the ring back around and addressed the emerald. “He was here because he got lost, Mr. Grist. He got lost on his daily walk in Chicago when his male nurse stepped into a bar for a couple of quick ones. Isn't that what they call it, 'a couple of quick ones'? The nurse didn't stop knocking back his quick ones until he realized Daddy was gone. Then, according to the police in Chicago, he went to the station and got on a train going somewhere.”

  “Why'd he do that? Why didn't he report your father missing?”

  “Because he knew I'd kill him.” There was no attempt at drama in her voice. She might have been reading the farm report.

  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 wante
d, 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 m
illion 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.”