The Four Last Things (Simeon Grist Mystery)

by Timothy Hallinan

  “You didn't know what Sally had on Merryman.”

  “No. As you say, they cut me out.”

  “You know now. Think it gives you the lever you need?”

  “If it doesn't, I've wasted a lot of legal training.”

  “So is it worth a million?”

  He stood up and ripped the pages neatly from his pad. Then he ripped out the four or five blank pages beneath and tore them into tiny pieces. He made a little heap of pieces on the desk and looked back down at his notes. He smiled at me.

  “I should say it is,” he said.

  Chapter 24

  We agreed to meet at five the next evening to exchange the statement for the money, and I left. Adelaide saw me to the door.

  “Please come back,” she said. “Sometime when you can stay for dinner.”

  “After the holidays,” I said, thinking that Merry was going to have a very long holiday indeed. Adelaide leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

  Well, dismiss it. Too bad for Adelaide. All the dead and violated crowded into the Camaro with me as I drove: Sally, Anna and her mother, Ellis Fauntleroy, Jessica and Mrs. Fram, Angel. Mary Claire? I didn't know about Mary Claire. They all sat there in reproachful silence as I drove downtown.

  What was needed was something decisive, and very, very public.

  It was well after seven when I got to the Russell Arms. I parked the Camaro on the street and walked over to the Borzoi.

  I began to spiral in on it from two blocks away, noting the names of the streets, counting paces, looking for pedestrian tunnels, manholes, anything that suggested the possibility of passage. When I finally angled into the square the Borzoi dominated, I was on the opposite side from the hotel.

  The homeless, temporarily liberated by the end of the rain from their cardboard and plastic, milled about aimlessly, talking to each other, talking to the sky, talking to themselves. Bottles were passed from hand to hand, no less carefully than Brooks had placed the tray on the polished desk. People wore anything—large coats, small trousers, pieces of rope, boots, bedroom slippers—as though their clothes had attacked them and fastened themselves to their bodies for life, like Spanish moss or mistletoe trailing from trees. The smell of humanity, concentrated and distilled, rose in eddies of conduction and roiled across the street toward me. The people in the square probably bathed more frequently than Louis XIV and his court. I closed my eyes and breathed it in, imagining the scent of Versailles.

  The front of the Borzoi was as brilliantly lighted as the Winter Palace of the czar. So was the studio adjacent to it. Glaring white light, enough to make me wince when I looked directly at it, poured across the sign that said church of the eternal moment. The reflected light scattered itself carelessly over the people in the square, bringing a face into sharp relief here and there, glinting off bottles, zippers, buttons, buckles, the occasional gold tooth. The light of sanctity was only loaned to them; when the Church was finished with its business, it would leave them once again in the dark.

  Well, the more people there were in the square, the better I liked it. I sat down on the curb and began to sketch the Borzoi and the studio on a pad I'd stolen from the Russell Arms. It said Holiday Inn at the bottom, which dulled the edge of my guilt.

  I drew the buildings high up on the pad, allowing everything but the three lowest floors of the Borzoi to run off the top of the page. Then, in dotted lines, I started to draw the basement as I remembered it.

  “Very nice,” said the man who had sat down next to me. He was wearing mismatched running shoes of different sizes and colors, and loose trousers that looked like they stayed up mainly because they were so sticky. The ensemble was topped off by what seemed to be a very good, if amazingly dirty, Giorgio Armani jacket.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “God didn't make buildings,” the man said, holding out a half-pint bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. I took a nip and handed it back.

  “He didn't?” I said, trying to orient the area of the basement that contained the kitchen. The man's hand fell on the pad, and I was forced to look up.

  “No,” he said slyly, “but he made the men who made the buildings.”

  I edged his hand off the pad. “I guess that's true.”

  “He pulls their spirits upward with invisible strings,” the man said, “and they build skeletons of steel so they can follow him toward heaven. The truest seeker after God in this century was the man who invented the elevator.”

  “Huh,” I said, feeling like Mrs. Fram. I wasn't at all sure of my scale, and I needed to be.

  “Even at sea, men put tall masts on ships so they can climb upward toward the Lord.”

  “I thought they were to hold the sails,” I said.

  “That's what they tell people,” he said. He gave an abrupt laugh. “Sails,” he said in vast amusement. He laughed some more.

  “Busy over there,” I said, sketching.

  “Always on Friday,” he said, subsiding into mere chuckles.

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow's the big day. The little chiclet.”

  “Have you been inside?”

  “No,” he said, drinking. “They don't let real people in.” He held the bottle out again and I declined. He looked at the pad again. “Why are you drawing basements?” he said.

  I stood up. “I want to get as far away from God as possible,” I said.

  I walked out of the square and then down a side street. Taking a right, I angled back to the alley that ran behind the Borzoi.

  It was empty and almost dark except for a couple of bare bulbs wearing tin hats that created cheerless cones of light that flickered down the rear wall of the building. I found the service entrances again and also a couple of casement windows that opened into the basement. I hadn't noticed any windows when I'd been down there, and now I knew why. They'd been painted a thick, sooty black on the outside. That way, no one inside could scratch a line of light into them.

  The locks were junk, in line with the Church's policy of spending only on what was directly in the line of sight. One peculiar touch was that both doors had chains on them like the one that Caleb Ellspeth had been so reluctant to undo. The chains were on the outside. And why not? Who would want to get into the basement?

  I checked for wires, leads, connections, electrical tape— any sign of an alarm system—and found none. The man they had put in the duct had said “thank you.” The woman in the dumbwaiter had closed the door on herself after I'd opened it. They didn't need alarms. They'd implanted the alarms in the people.

  At the far left of the building I found the intake for the air conditioner and heating system. It was a big, heavily screened area about four feet square. The screen was fastened with new screws but they'd been screwed into an old wall. I didn't think they'd be much trouble.

  The TV studio was a bigger problem. There were entrances and exits on three sides, one of them a big loading dock with an airplane door. People were working there, toting television equipment from a long green semi into the studio. Among them was my friend in the Hussong's T-shirt. I watched from a doorway as long as I felt was safe, and then walked back to the Russell Arms.

  In my room, I transferred the sketch to a larger piece of paper, added the doors and windows to it, and then used a red pen to trace the path I thought the ducts took. When I'd finished that, I drew the whole thing over from above. Then, for practice, I reversed my first drawing and tried to sketch the entire basement complex as it would appear from the alley behind the Borzoi. I taped all three sketches to the wall and sat on the bed to study them.

  Of course, more of the area than I would have liked was purely hypothetical. I'd never been to the right of the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the fire stairs, the direction that led toward the light. The fire stairs, though, ran down the inside of the wall that the Borzoi shared with the TV studio. The corridors to the right could only lead to the studio.

  The question was: who was between the Borzoi and the studio? Whoever
they were, they were in for a rotten time.

  But I couldn't do it all by myself. I needed some help. I needed a man of talent. I needed Dexter Smif.

  Chapter 25

  “Have you got a gun?” I asked into the phone.

  “Does Archie got zits?” he said. “What caliber you want? Twenty-two? Thirty-eight? Automatic? Revolver? Belly-gun? Smith & Wesson? Uzi?”

  “You've got an Uzi?”

  “Nah. I lied about the Uzi.”

  “Can you get your uniform?”

  “I don't need no uniform.”

  “Why not?”

  “White reflects light, don't you know that? Black absorbs it. Black skin is the cloak of invisibility, least as far as white people are concerned.”

  “I'd still rather you wore the uniform.”

  He let out an exasperated breath. “Man don't trust the power of metaphor,” he said.

  “What about the truck? Can you get it?”

  “Why not? Who else gone want it?”

  “Can you get them tonight?”

  There was a pause. “Thass a problem,” he said. “The yard's closed for the night.”

  “What time do they open?”

  “‘Bout five-thirty in the ayem.”

  “Fine. We won't begin until noon or so. You can pick them up at ten.” I sat there thinking.

  “You gone tell me what we doin’?” he said into the silence.

  “I'll explain it when you get here. How long will it take?”

  “Well, that depend on where you are, don't it?”

  I told him where I was.

  ‘They got room service there?”

  “Hell,” I said. “They've barely got rooms.”

  “Order us up a pizza. You'll see me before you see it. One thing.”

  “What?”

  “No anchovy on that pizza, or I'm gone.”

  He beat the pizza by about two minutes, lugging a six-pack of Mickey's Big Mouth, and sauntered around the room looking both amused and pleased with himself. “My, my,” he said, “You do live in style, don't you? One fine domicile after another. Ain't you afraid of gettin’ soft, pampering youself like this?” In the cramped confines of the Russell Arms he looked even taller than he had at my house. He had to duck his head to pass under the lighting fixture that hung from the center of the ceiling.

  “I got a couple of questions,” he said, popping the top from a Mickey's and handing it to me. “This gone to be dangerous?”

  “No more dangerous than Grenada.”

  “Good. I slep’ through that. Next question. We the good guys or the bad guys?”

  I put my hand over my heart. “Dexter,” I said, “You wound me. Look at this face.”

  He grinned. “Thass the pizza,” he said. I hadn't heard anything. A moment later, someone knocked.

  “Jus’ in case,” he said, stepping behind the door.

  It was the pizza. The delivery boy, a bent and befuddled octogenarian, was terrified when I closed the door behind him to reveal Dexter looming two feet above his head.

  “This hinge is terrible,” Dexter said to himself, examining it. He looked down at the delivery boy. “Oh, hello,” he said in a British accent. “I'm the doorman. This door needs help. You wouldn't have any WD-40, would you?”

  The delivery boy shook his head helplessly and wobbled backward out of the room. He forgot to give me my change. Dexter opened the box and folded himself somehow so that he could sit on the edge of one of the beds. His knees jutted out at acute angles, reaching almost to his chin. He took a bite of pizza.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let's hear what you proposin’.”

  I gave him five or six minutes of background. When I got to Sally he stopped chewing, and when I told him about Merryman and the little girls he put the pizza down. “Riptahls,” he said. “Snakes and ‘phibians.” I told him the rest of it. He shook his head, not looking like anyone I really wanted to know.

  “This all got somethin’ to do with those pieces of paper on the wall?”

  “Well, yes,” I said with more than a little reluctance. I took down the overhead view and told him what I thought we might do. He listened in absolute silence, except for one brief cackle of laughter. When I'd finished he sat quietly for longer than I would have thought possible, following the floorplan with his eyes. Then he grunted and looked up at me.

  “From a purely determinist viewpoint,” he said, “we might not get killed. I ain't sure I always agreed with ol' Jerry about determinism, though.”

  “Have you got a better idea?” I said. It hadn't sounded exactly watertight to me either.

  “Maybe one or two little improvements,” he said.

  It took him two minutes to fix things to the point where I could almost believe the plan would work.

  An hour later he was stretched out on top of the other bed, sound asleep. His head was touching the headboard and his bare feet dangled over the end. He hadn't bothered with the blankets. Other than the boots, he hadn't undressed. Neither had I. I turned off the light and lay for what seemed like hours, looking up at the ceiling and listening to Dexter breathe. When I eased myself off the bed to go to the bathroom, a hand grasped my wrist. I looked down at Dexter. I hadn't even heard him move.

  “All right,” he said, gazing up at me. When I came back a minute later he was asleep again. A few minutes later, so was I.

  The phone rang from very far off, at the end of a long, narrow, dark corridor. I had to navigate the corridor to get to it, but it kept receding in front of me like the shimmer of a mirage. When I finally caught it and picked it up, the handset turned into a snake. I woke up.

  The phone was ringing, and Dexter was lying on his side with his eyes wide open. “Hard man to wake up,” he said.

  “Nobody knows this number,” I said. “Nobody but Eleanor.” I picked it up and said hello.

  It wasn't Eleanor.

  “Simeon,” a familiar voice said. “How nice to know you're in the neighborhood.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Please. You disappoint me. Simeon, it's Dick.”

  IV - Hell

  Chapter 26

  I signaled to Dexter, but he'd already gotten up without looking at me and started to pull on his socks.

  “Hi, Dick,” I said, fighting a wave of blind terror. “What's up?”

  “Well, I've been having the most fascinating chat with your Miss Chan,” he said. “She has a genuinely amusing idea. She wants to make a mini-series based on the Church. Think of it, Simeon. We'll all be famous.”

  Dexter was tucking in his shirt. He hadn't made a sound.

  “How'd you get her?” I said.

  “We just bumped into her last night in the parking lot of the Times. Coincidence of the sheerest sort. Well, I hadn't actually had the pleasure of meeting her, although all sorts of other people had, so naturally we brought her over here.”

  “Last night.” I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach.

  “Oh, we've had hours. It's been very entertaining. I must say, though, it took some persuasion to get her to tell us your new phone number. You move around so. Still, I suppose if people can walk in and out of your house with ease, it's a good idea to take up temporary residence elsewhere. And, of course, it's given me an opportunity to get to know Miss Chan.”

  “She's a little old for you, isn't she, Dick?” I said. Dexter had pulled on one boot.

  “Now,” he said, “that's no attitude to take. I find her delightful. Even attractive in an exotic sort of way. Her skin is so much smoother than you'd expect in a woman her age. Perhaps I should have discovered Oriental women earlier.”

  “If you've hurt her I'll kill you,” I said.

  “I don't think you'll get the chance,” he said lightly. “Listen, Simeon, it really is convenient, your being in the neighborhood. This mini-series idea is intriguing, but there are a few details I'd like to discuss with you before we give you exclusive rights.”

  With both his boots on and laced, Dext
er was straightening the bed and gathering up everything he'd brought. He hadn't met my eyes since I picked up the phone.

  “What I'd like you to do,” Merryman said, “is come straight over here, on foot, alone, without calling anybody first. And to make sure you don't, I've sent someone to walk with you. In fact, he's there already.”

  I looked helplessly up at Dexter. He picked up the automatic he'd brought and glanced down at me carelessly. It was the first time he'd looked at me. Then he examined the room to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything.

  “At the sound of the tone,” Merryman said, “it will be eight o'clock.”

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Dexter ripped the floor plans off the wall and stepped into the closet, closing the door after him. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

  I went to the door and opened it, and found myself looking at Needle-nose.

  “Hi, I'm Barry,” he said in a toneless voice. “I'll be your flight attendant this morning. Dick told me to say that. Would you like to get your shoes?” He looked incuriously around the room. “What a shithole,” he said.

  I put my shoes on while he went over and picked up the phone. “I've got him,” he said. He listened for a second and then hung up. “Aren't we going to have fun?” he said.

  I pulled on my jacket.

  “Turn around,” Barry said, “and put your hands against the wall. Higher.” He patted me down professionally and removed the automatic from the jacket pocket. “Naughty, naughty,” he said reprovingly. “Anything else?”

  “No,” I said. He'd missed the pimp's knife, which I'd shoved into the jacket lining just behind the base of the zipper. It banged against my stomach as we walked toward the door. He opened it and motioned me through. “Say good-bye,” he said.

  “Good-bye,” I said obediently. “This certainly messes up my timing.” I hoped Dexter could hear me through the closet door.

  “It doesn't matter,” Barry said, closing the door. “It doesn't matter at all.”

  We went down in the elevator in silence.

  “Now, you're not going to give me any trouble,” he said as we stepped into the bright, warm morning, “because of your pretty little Chink girl. I don't have to hold a gun on you or nothing. Just think about her and walk a nice straight line. You know where the hotel is.”