There was no window, and the room was dark. The light from the hallway barely dented the gloom. The air was heavy with a mixture of odors that made me instinctively want to hold my breath. The light switch flipped up with a rewarding snap, but nothing happened. I wished again that I still smoked; at least then I'd have had a match. Since I didn't, I worked my way through the living room and into the minuscule kitchen, where I unscrewed the light bulb over the sink. Bulb in hand and feeling uncomfortably like a well-trained rat in a maze, I padded back to the bathroom.
There was an empty socket next to the bathroom mirror, and I wound the bulb into it. I'd left the light switch up, and I had to blink against the sudden glare.
Despite the dire warning, I'd seen worse bathrooms, my own, at times, among them. The toilet was stained and streaked and odorous, the tile was peeling away from the walls, the linoleum floor was as warped and rippling as the sea in a Hiroshige print. It wasn't until I slid aside the shower curtain that the Dante quote made sense.
The tub was full of rags and metal containers. Each was labeled. A square of white paper had been glued to the side of each, and on the labels, penned in the same metallic gold ink in which he'd written my letters, were the words, GASOLINE, KEROSENE, BENZINE, DENATURED ALCOHOL. Fumes rolled out of the enclosure, heavy and ripe with fire. If I'd struck a match, I'd have been have been blown into memory.
After I closed the door and gave the keys back to the manager, I walked toward Alice, squinting into the bright summer sunlight of Normal Street and trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.
15
Reverse Field
“He's finished with something,” I said. “God knows what it is, but he's reached a point of completion.”
The curtains in the suite in the Bel Air Hotel had been drawn, and the day had been locked outside. Annabelle Winston, draped in a white sheet, was a dim horizontal silhouette on a long table in the center of the room. A very tall woman, dressed entirely in white, compressed various of Annabelle's muscles and stretched others, and a very short woman wearing more colors than a chemical bonfire sat on a footstool and pruned fingernails. Every time I heard her clippers snick together, the muscles in my back jumped and hunched.
“What's the Eighth Dwarf doing here?” Annabelle Winston demanded, without turning to face us. She'd turned away when she saw Schultz. Schultz wasted an amber grin on her hair. “And what gives you the idea he's finished?”
“For Christ's sake, shut up,” I said. It got her attention. She even turned her head to face me.
“You don't want to make that a habit,” she said. “Or is it our intention to get out of line?”
“You want your money back?”
“Can you get that, please?” She waved a hand at the phone. Two gold bracelets rattled against a Vacheron-Constantine watch, making a sound that Scrooge McDuck could have heard six blocks away.
“Oh, sure,” I said. I picked up the receiver and said, “Miss Winston will call you back. She's being landscaped.” I hung up and pulled out the plug.
“Do I want the money back?” she said reflectively. “What would I do with it?”
“How would I know? Get your elbows pumiced.”
“Well,” she said, completely unruffled, “I think at this point that I'm entitled to know what I'm buying.” She withdrew a hand from the manicurist's grasp, shifted beneath the sheet, and rested her chin on her hand. Deprived of a focal point, the manicurist gazed into the middle distance.
“At the moment, you're buying Dr. Norbert Schultz,” I said. “Dr. Schultz. Miss Annabelle Winston.”
“We've met,” Annabelle Winston said, “and it hasn't been an impressive experience.”
“Boy, oh boy,” Schultz said, “I'm sorry about that.”
“With all due respect,” Annabelle Winston said, “what I'm asking is why you've brought him here. And why in the world I should pay for him.”
“He's here,” I said, “because I know who the Incinerator is and because I've been to his apartment—by his invitation—and because I don't know what to do about it. Dr. Schultz is my alternative to a real cop.”
“And a real psychologist, too,” Annabelle Winston said. “Two alternatives for the price of one genuine item.” Then her eyes widened and she said “Cigarette” to the woman working on her back. “You saw him?” she demanded. “What do you mean, you saw him?”
“I didn't say I'd seen him,” I said. “By which I mean I have seen him, but not recently.”
Annabelle Winston held up a slender hand, ignoring the fact that the sheet had slipped from her shoulder, and a cigarette was placed between her fingers. She never took her eyes off me. The manicurist, glad to have something to do, grabbed a lighter, and Annabelle Winston inhaled. Schultz, following her movements as though from a great distance, took out a new pack of Dunhills and pried one loose. The two of them lit up almost simultaneously, from opposite ends of the room.
“I told you,” Annabelle Winston said, looking away from me and seeing him exhale, but she didn't finish her sentence. Schultz gave her a broad holiday smile and pointed his cigarette at the one in her own hand.
“So get cancer, Doctor,” she said dismissively. “But my question still stands. Or, rather, questions. What do you mean, you've seen him but you haven't seen him? What do you mean, you know who he is?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, feeling as though everything was moving too fast for me.
“Fine,” Annabelle Winston said. “I'll get dressed.” The manicurist and the masseuse were tipped and dismissed, and Annabelle Winston exited the room wrapped demurely in the sheet and reentered seconds later in the inevitable silk. Then the two of them, Schultz and Annabelle Winston, smoked furiously while I told them about Wilton Hoxley and explained my reasoning about the crossword puzzle in the Incinerator's apartment, and Schultz said, “Hmmm,” several times in the best psychologist's manner. By the time I was finished, I had swallowed two of Annabelle's cigarettes in an effort to keep myself awake, and Schultz had seated himself uncomfortably on the corner of a fake Empire desk, his feet dangling. His feet, I saw with some dismay, were clad in a pair of white patent-leather loafers of the type affected by retired Beverly Hills gentlemen who may once have had something to do with show business.
“Did he change his name legally?” Schultz snapped authoritatively. It was a new tone from him, at least in Annabelle Winston's presence.
“That's an interesting question,” I said, trying to blink the fatigue away, “and I don't know the answer to it.”
“Why's it so interesting?” Annabelle Winston asked.
“Because he'd have to give a permanent address,” Schultz said. “A name change takes a while.”
“My father's name change took months,” Annabelle Winston said.
“Months,” Schultz said, working at not gloating. “In California, it can take years. Remember H. L. Mencken. The continent slopes down to the west, and everything that's loose eventually rolls to California. We're careful about name changes.”
“Can you check it for me?” I asked Schultz.
“Without the cops knowing?”
“That depends,” I said, “on what we come up with. And on what happens after we come up with it.”
“Only the first name?” Schultz said, pulling out a pad. “He keep Hoxley, or did he change both of them?”
“He changed the first to Festus,” I said again, “or maybe Hephaestus, I don't know. He kept Hoxley. He's Hoxley in the phone book,”
“Hah,” Schultz said.
“Why 'hah'?” Annabelle Winston asked Schultz, in spite of herself.
“Hephaestus. Blacksmith of the gods,” Schultz said happily. “Keeper of the flame, et cetera. Not a name, I'd say, chosen at random.”
“I'm still not exactly sure that I care what you'd say,” Annabelle Winston said, presumably to make up for her lapse.
“Listen,” I said. “Maybe I should try Esperanto. We need help. This guy is playing
me like a fish, letting me out and then reeling me in again whenever he feels like it. He's a trickster. Dr. Schultz is a psychologist who specializes in people who murder for fun. I've got a promise of legal secrecy from him because I'm his patient. You're paying his hourly rate. Whatever you think about his nicotine addiction, he's on our side now.”
I picked up another of Annabelle Winston's cigarettes and flicked her 24-karat Bic. “Since the police double-crossed me, I've played it Hoxley's way,” I said. “I went on TV. I did my best to make him sound like the greatest genius since Giotto. I delivered a heartfelt message. In response, he booby-trapped my house. I've been playing by his rules, and all I've gotten is an eighty-octane mattress. So what am I supposed to do now?”
“Who's this girl you're protecting?” Annabelle Winston asked.
“What's that got to do with anything?”
Annabelle Winston shrugged an economical quarter-inch. “Just asking.”
“Not relevant,” I said. “Here's what's relevant. Once I figured out who he is, I went to a place he'd already guessed I'd go and found out he'd left a message for me. The message directed me to his apartment, where I found some stuff that seems to say he's finished.”
“People like this don't just fold their tents and get a job selling shoes,” Annabelle Winston said.
“The Zodiac quit,” Schultz said. “Emil Kemper quit. They fulfilled their mission, whatever it was, and just stopped. We never would have caught Kemper if he hadn't phoned in a confession and waited in the phone booth until the police arrived.”
“Mission?” I asked.
“In the classic sense of the word,” Schultz said, billowing smoke. “These people have a mission. God speaks to them. Angels sit on their shoulders to help them pick out the next one. When the score is even, whatever score, they quit.” He was gaining confidence from the sound of his own voice. “Who knows what the score is? One life for every slap they suffered as a kid. One for every man their mother slept with while the kid listened through the wall. One for every book in the Old Testament. You mean, what's the math? We're talking about people who see patterns in the way leaves cluster on trees. He could be killing one person for every stop sign he passed walking home from sixth grade.”
“But you don't believe that,” I said.
Schultz licked his thumb and applied saliva to a tear in his cigarette. “No,” he said, “I don't. I think it has something to do with his mother and father. Jesus, look at the Hephaestus bit.” He grasped the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, looking like an imitation Russian in a B-movie of the forties, and puffed. “Born lame, booted out of heaven by his own mother. Now that he's killing both women and men,” he said, “I think we were right before. I think this is sexual, and sexual means Mommy.” He gave all of us the dubious benefit of the amber smile. “So why did he guide you to the apartment?”
“Because he's playing with me,” I said slowly, feeling the atmosphere of the room gather around me and weigh me down. “Because he knows he can jerk me around. I think the real question is what he wants me to do about it.”
“You've got his name,” Schultz said. “That means that DMV could give us the plate on that Mazda.”
“You can get it,” I said. “Give it to the cops, I don't care. If they get him, great, but they won't. I'm betting that he's finished with the Mazda, too. Let me know if they find it, but I think he's finished with it, just as he is with the apartment. Hell, put the cops on the name change, too, if you think it'll help. Just keep them away from me. I've got to figure out whether to do what he wants me to do.”
“Maybe he's not finished,” Schultz said.
“Back off, Doctor,” Annabelle Winston said. “You just heard Simeon say that the puzzle was complete.”
“That puzzle,” Schultz said. “That apartment. How do we know he doesn't have another puzzle, and another apartment? Maybe he's got another mission, too.”
We all listened to the words hitting the carpet.
“And what does he want you to do?” Schultz said. “Put yourself in his place.”
“I don't know. To make him famous, I guess.”
Schultz nodded and lighted another Dunhill. “And what doesn't he want you to do?” Schultz asked around a cumulus cloud of smoke.
“I don't know that either.” I closed my eyes so tightly that I could see little red dots, blood vessels rupturing in the retina. “To get closer, I guess. He figures he can control how close I get.”
“Right,” Schultz said. “And how do you get closer?”
I was all grit, a cement mixer filled with dry sand and gravel. “Mommy, I suppose,” I said. “But that means he's going to come for me.”
Annabelle Winston started to say something and thought better of it.
“Right,” Schultz said again. “You get to Mommy, he's going to come for you. But he's only going to come for you if you're clear of the cops.” He sighed. “No publicity on the apartment.” He rubbed his face. “So what you do, you reverse field. Stop doing what he wants. Do what he doesn't want. I'll keep the cops away from you, and you go talk to Mommy, if you can find her. Are you ready for that?”
I nodded. It was easier than talking. I wasn't certain I could make my jaws work. I'd just discovered that it was possible to feel sad, weary, and panicked simultaneously.
“He's not bait,” Annabelle Winston said.
“Oh, yes, he is,” Schultz replied complacently. “And he knew that a long time ago, and so did you. We can't find the Incinerator's hole, so we have to bring him out of it. It's like killing a gopher.”
I could hear Annabelle Winston swallow all the way across the room.
“And you know how to find her,” Schultz said.
“Sure,” I said, feeling like an emotional lottery. “Get me the address on the name change.”
For two more days, I stayed away from home, ricocheting around Los Angeles and threatening the drivers and pedestrians of Los Angeles by driving with one, and sometimes two, eyes on the rearview mirror, twelve to sixteen hours a day. Schultz was as good as his word, or if he wasn't, I didn't find out about it. I slept, when I slept at all, in hotels with multiple stories and internal elevators, safe from outside eyes, dozing no more than two or three hours before checking out and hitting the freeways again. I did the whole internal loop: Ventura Freeway to Hollywood Freeway to San Bernardino Freeway, cutting through surface streets in the Chinese enclave of Monterey Park before picking up yet another freeway. As far as I could tell he wasn't behind me. But, of course, there was the dance card. I hadn't thought he was behind me then, either.
I'd never felt so disconnected in my life. No one I loved—or even particularly liked—was available. Eleanor was in a hotel somewhere, and even if she wanted to see me, I was afraid to see her. She might be with Burt, and Wilton Hoxley might be with me. Friends like Wyatt and Annie Wilmington were too dear to take a chance on hauling Hoxley along in my wake. Even worse, most of them had children. Little fatty children. One night I had a dream in which a child exploded in flame.
Hammond hated my guts. No one can hate you like an old friend.
From time to time, in various hotel rooms, I checked in with my answering machine before I collapsed, fully clothed, onto the bed. I slept lightly and badly, chased by dreams, and the hotel operator always awakened me after the requisite two or three hours, and I threw cold water into my face and hit the freeways again.
No one got burned. No lunatics in rubber trench coats stalked any of L.A.'s burgeoning skid rows.
There were, according to Billy Pinnace, who had been deputized by me to check my mailbox when he was absolutely sure no strangers were around, no letters.
Hermione had finally remembered her last name and been sent home to crawl the pubs, so another promise had been kept. The newspapers said that the heroine had traveled first class. The image of Norman signing the check had given me a brief moment of pleasure. Nothing more about Hermione.
Nothing in the papers about Mrs
. Gottfried.
There was, in all, enough nothing to satisfy an atheist.
The police did, however, find the Mazda, gutted by fire about three blocks from Normal Street. He'd had the nerve to come back after the fire and hang a blond fright wig over the remnants of the rearview mirror. Well, I didn't have any doubts about his nerve.
I was stretched to the point of transparency, beginning to be grateful when I saw only double, when I called the answering machine from some hotel or another in the middle of the night and got Schultz's voice reciting an address.
“It's 13156 Via del Valle,” he'd said before hanging up.
The hotel's electric clock, thoughtfully bolted to the table in case the weary traveler tried to pack it by mistake, said 5:20 A.M. The weary traveler slept for two rotten hours before performing his habitual ablutions— two handfuls of cold water, thrown directly into the eyes—and hitting the road.
Via del Valle, according to my Thomas map book, was a short, coiled rattlesnake of a street that had been brutally cut into one of the very small hills that comprised the exclusive San Fernando Valley enclave called Hidden Hills. Low ranch-style houses sat defiantly in the chaparral, daring the god of fire to drop by.
Number 13156 was the paragon of the street, a fact easily deduced from its position: It was the highest, the largest, the house most vulnerable to fire. There was a buzz-box at the bottom of the driveway with a button, a microphone, and a square numeric keypad on its face, and unless you knew the numerical code, an acceptable answer given to the buzz-box was the only way to prompt the electrical impulse that would open the iron gates. The gates wouldn't have slowed a fire down much. It was already 92 degrees.
“Yeah?” growled a male voice. He sounded as if he'd just gotten up, and since it was only nine o'clock and since it was that neighborhood, maybe he had.
“Wilton Hoxley,” I said.
“Wilton? Punch up the goddamn code.” The voice was like a cigar's garage.
“This isn't Wilton,” I said. “I'm here to talk about Wilton.”
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