The four last things sg-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  People were pressing in on them now, squeezing past the Ushers to greet Angel and thank her for the Revealing. A couple of them shook her hand. Mary Claire's hand fell protectively onto her daughter's shoulder, but Angel ignored it. She exchanged polite words with the adults, and when a girl her own age came up to her, a friend, apparently, she whispered something and giggled.

  "I want to meet them," I said.

  "Sure," Skippy said, "no problem." We started toward them.

  "What do I call her?"

  "What do you mean? You think she's the Queen Mother or something? When she's not Speaking she's just a little kid. Call her Angel."

  We were about ten feet from them when something behind us fell with a loud crash. I turned quickly to see the heavyset woman who'd asked for Skippy's autograph, looking mortally embarrassed in front of an overturned table of books. She and two Listeners started to pick them up. When I looked back at Angel, she was surrounded by a white wall of Ushers, as alert as Secret Service men, standing shoulder to shoulder. Merryman had one hand on Mary Claire's shoulder and the other on Angel's. His face was set and hard.

  "Come on," Skippy said. "The emergency's over."

  Merryman caught sight of us as we approached and he relaxed into a pointy-toothed smile. "Ah, Skippy," he said, "I see you found Simeon."

  "How's Angel?" Skippy asked.

  "Fine. Too many french fries. She and her mother went into the McDonald's in Carmel this afternoon, and Angel, as they put it these days, pigged out. Have you enjoyed yourself, Simeon?"

  "It's been very instructive, Dick." The electricity between us was so negative that if we'd been hanging from the ceiling on wires we'd have flown apart.

  "You'll want to say hello to Angel," he said. "And Mary Claire, of course."

  Mary Claire gave me a grave smile and a cool hand. Up close there was something coarse and worn about her. Her hair wasn't quite clean, and there was a slack looseness to her full lips. Angel was chatting animatedly with Skippy, asking him something about the young male lead on his show, but when Merryman touched her shoulder she looked up politely.

  "Angel Ellspeth, this is Simeon Grist. This was Simeon's first Revealing, Angel."

  "Pleased to meetcha," Angel said in a voice that was pure New York. "Didja like it?"

  I couldn't have been more surprised if she'd sung the bass aria from Aida. If I'd had my back turned I would have thought it was a joke, Skippy imitating the Dead End Kids in falsetto.

  "Yes," was the best I could manage at first. Then I said, "Did you like it?"

  "Sure," she said, pronouncing it "shooah." She looked puzzled at the question.

  "What does it feel like when you Speak?"

  "Great." She gave me a broad smile. "It's like I got a really good friend, you know?"

  "Do you remember what you said?"

  "Never," Merryman said. "It's ironic. Angel is the only person in the room who doesn't hear the Revealing."

  We smiled at each other over how ironic it was.

  "I listen later, onna tape," Angel said in the voice of a castrato Manhattan cabdriver. "I got a little Walkman, I play it on that." She looked up at her mother. "I don't get a lot of it, though."

  "We learn about the Church through Revealings, of course," Merryman said, "but we learn about ourselves through Listening, and children don't begin Listening sessions until they're ten. Even though they're spoken through her, the Revealings are a little advanced for her." He threw me the smile again. I didn't throw it back.

  "Hell," Skippy said, looking apprehensively from Merryman to me and back again. "They're advanced for me."

  Angel tugged at her mother's arm. Mary Claire leaned down, and Angel whispered something in her ear. Merryman watched them closely.

  Mary Claire raised a hand. People stopped talking at once. "Angel's tired now" she said. "I've got to put her to bed. Please stay and enjoy yourselves. Over on Table Ten, by the way, are tapes of the First Revealing, through poor little Anna. This is the first time they've been available in some time. Thank you all for coming."

  The Ushers closed ranks around them, and Angel, Mary Claire, and Merryman went back the way they'd come. I found myself looking at the back of Angel's slender neck, bared by the upsweep of the pony tail. It was a neck made for the headsman's ax.

  "Hey, the time," Skippy said. "Your plane is at when?"

  "Ten," I said, watching them go. Angel had hold of her mother's hand.

  "You'd better roll. Unless you'd like to stay here, I mean. I've got an extra bed in my cottage. I've also got some more Glenfiddich. You could sit up and chat with Dr. Merryman, you seem to like him so much."

  "Thanks," I said. "I've got an early morning, and it'll be better if the clock goes off in L.A."

  He walked me out to the rented car. As I sat there fiddling with the controls and trying to remember how the damn thing started, he cleared his throat meaningfully and I looked up at him.

  "So," he said. "Do you think I'm crazy?"

  "No." I gave the steering wheel a half-twist and turned the key again. This time the engine caught. "I think I am."

  My plane left two hours late. At two-twenty that morning I coasted Alice to a stop in front of Sally Oldfield's house and watched the rain spatter the windshield.

  There wasn't a lighted window on the block. I could have fired a load of grapeshot down the middle of the street and not hit anyone. Even the cats were inside waiting for the rain to let up. The clouds were low enough to reflect the lights of the city with a chill, chalky glow. It looked like the cats were going to have a long wait.

  I wasn't dressed for this. By the time I'd pushed open the little gate at the side of Sally's house, I was soaked to the skin and colder than the glimmer of hope at the gates of hell. The low-hanging leaves of a ficus brushed at my face as I tracked along the side of the house. They felt almost warm by comparison. I rounded the corner into the tiny backyard and found myself looking at a perfectly maintained little vegetable garden. I was so cold that my thought processes had slowed; it took me maybe ten seconds to realize why I could see it.

  There were lights on in the back of the house.

  I ducked beneath a window and let the rain pelt me. I had visions of running into the boys in blue. Then I remembered that they didn't have Sally's name, and I had visions of running into something worse.

  The time seemed ripe for a futile gesture, so I turned up the collar on my shirt and got exactly what I should have expected: an icy rivulet of water down my back. In the conventions of Japanese samurai literature, such moments usually bring the hero instantaneous enlightenment. What this one brought me was an overpowering desire to sneeze.

  But I didn't. And then I didn't again. In all, I didn't sneeze about once every thirty seconds during the fifteen minutes or so I huddled there waiting for any kind of movement within the house. When the fifteen minutes were up I raised myself an inch at a time and looked in through the window. Another futile gesture. The blinds were drawn.

  Well, either someone was in there or they weren't, and I couldn't squat in the lettuce any longer without running the risk of hypothermia. I went to the back door and opened it, failing to be surprised by the fact that it was unlocked, and shouted cheerily, "Hi, honey, I'm home." I felt like Ricky Ricardo. Lucy, Fred and Ethel, Little Ricky, or any combination thereof would have looked very good to me.

  They weren't there, or if they were, they didn't answer. I was in a laundry room. The dryer was open and clothes were spilled out of it, a cascade of white onto the red clay tile floor. Sally Oldfield had looked like the kind of woman who sorted her whites. She hadn't looked like the kind of woman who emptied her dryer onto the floor.

  Most laundry rooms open onto kitchens; it's cheaper for the contractors to keep all the plumbing in one place. Sally's house was no exception. I eased open the door at the end of the laundry room and stood there staring at chaos.

  The drawers had all been pulled out and dumped upside down into the center of the roo
m. Cooking implements were scattered everywhere. The top of the stove had been pulled off to reveal the gas pipes beneath. Pilot lights glowed a pale blue. The test of a great housekeeper is the area beneath the cooktop. Sally's was immaculate. I felt obscurely proud of her.

  Whoever had taken the place apart had been uncommonly thorough. In the tiny dining room the table was upside down, as were the chairs, just in case something had been taped to their undersides. The sofa in the cozy little living room had been dismantled and the cushions and backs had been slit open. The oval hooked rug, probably a family hand-me-down, had been yanked to one side and turned over.

  On the floor in a corner, near an uprooted potted palm, some rectangles caught my attention. I picked them up, shook the potting soil off them, and turned them over.

  Pictures. Sally and a man who might have been Mr. Oldfield smiled into the camera, standing in front of someplace tropical, Hawaii maybe. Sally looked young and brave and full of conviction: this marriage was going to last forever. Their clothes, post-hippie loose and colorful, dated the pictures in the seventies.

  The photographs had been torn from their frames. In two of them, a knife had made a savage X through Sally's face. The man who held the knife must have known he had all the time in the world, pausing for a meaningless act of spite. I felt murderous.

  It was the same story everywhere. She had slept in a single bed, in a room that had once been almost Japanese in its austerity. The bed had been ravaged with the knife, one long jagged slash running from the head of the narrow mattress to the foot. Near an upended vanity table I picked up a hairbrush. It had a few of her hairs in it.

  I sat on the box spring and pictured her getting up in the morning. She would have put on the pale blue robe that lay crumpled against the wall and gone into the bathroom for her shower. Then, probably even before she drank her coffee, she would have sat in the early sunlight streaming through the east-facing bedroom windows and brushed her hair. She'd had beautiful hair. She'd taken care of her hair, not out of vanity but out of self-respect.

  "What was your secret, Sally?" I said out loud. "Why did they do it?" This wasn't random, it wasn't a sex slaying that began and ended in some shithouse motel on Sunset. Sally Oldfield, as sweet as she had seemed to be, had gotten mixed up with pros.

  In all, I sat there for an hour. Then I left, closing the front door on the odds and ends of Sally Oldfield's life and on her secret too.

  Chapter 8

  Her name was Rhoda Gerwitz, and she'd just canceled her wedding.

  "I mean, honest to God, the creep, he's got the emotional depth of a cold sore. All chin and no forehead," she said around a mouthful of hamburger. She'd briefly considered the chefs salad and then rejected it; after all, she could stop worrying about fitting into her wedding dress.

  "Can you imagine?" She extricated a limp piece of onion from her mouth, looked at it critically, and put it on the edge of her plate. "Here's my best friend, my number-one bridesmaid, vanished from the face of the earth. I was going to heave the bouquet straight at her, and she's fallen over the edge somewhere. Well, how could I don the lace and orange blossoms and waltz down the aisle under such a cloud? Pass the catsup?"

  I handed it to her and she upended it over her french fries. It made a gurgling sound. "If you're a girl," she continued, monitoring the catsup's flow, "men being what they are, odds are pretty good you're going to marry a jerk. No offense, I hope, present company excepted, and you seem like a nice-enough guy. But there's jerks and then there's jerks. If you're going to put up a sign that says no jerks, you're going to be an old maid." She giggled. "I always loved that expression," she said. " 'Old maid.' Like there's no way to have fun except getting married. If mama only knew. Still, like I said, there's jerks and jerks. A girl's gotta have standards."

  "And his J.Q. was too high."

  She stopped chewing and gave me a level gaze. "J.Q.?"

  "Jerk Quotient."

  She sputtered and grabbed a napkin. "Don't do that," she said. "Not when my mouth is full. Sally always says that the only problem with eating lunch with me is that she needs a raincoat." She stopped talking, looked at the burger, and put it down. "Aah, shit," she said, "Sally." She dabbed at a corner of her mouth with her napkin. It was the wrong corner. "How long have you known her for?"

  I tried to remember what I'd told Rhoda on the phone, couldn't, and said, "A few months. Enough to want to try to find her." I'd spent most of two days finding out everything I could about Sally Oldfield, and I almost felt like I was telling the truth. Patrick Henry had used his L.A. Times clout to trace Rhoda Gerwitz's name from the license plate I gave him, in exchange for a renewed promise to speak to him and only him when and if there were anything worth telling. I'd called Rhoda at Monument Records and set up a lunch.

  "The cops," Rhoda was saying. "If she's not dead, they don't want to know about it. It's enough to make you crazy. I've been to her house, knocked on the door, phoned her a dozen times. They didn't even know the color of her eyes. And then there's Herbert. Herbert-that's el jerkerino's name-says to me, 'You don't need a bridesmaid to get married, all you need is a groom.' Can you imagine? All I asked was to put it off until she turned up, or… well, you know. The sonofabitch. But listen, even if he's as dumb as a toadstool, you're not supposed to explain to a guy that's popped the question, so to speak, that a husband is a husband but a girlfriend is for life. This is not considered good strategy in the war between the sexes." The skin around her eyes crumpled up and she poked the hamburger with her index finger. It didn't poke back. "Do you think she's okay?" she asked the hamburger. "I don't think she's okay."

  She blinked a couple of times, fast. "Can you return a wedding gown?" she said.

  "I don't know. I've never bought one."

  "Sally said…" She swallowed even though her mouth was empty. "Sally said that the trouble with a wedding gown was all those miles of fabric. If the bride had as much mileage on her as the gown, she said, no man would ever get married." She tried a smile but it didn't work out. "Anyway, they had to let it out," she said. "After all those salads. They're not going to take it back. And even if they did, I think I'd keep it. As a reminder of all the jerks in the world." She lifted her glass of beer.

  "To Sally turning up safe," she said. "So you're a bachelor, huh?"

  "I'm too old to be a bachelor. I'm an old maid."

  "What're you anyway, thirty, thirty-one?"

  "Thirty-four."

  "Sally is thirty-two. Always worried about her birthday, which, by the way, is coming up, always wrinkling her nose like every birthday took her one step closer to looking like Margo coming out of Shangri-La, you know that movie? She's always checking her hair like she expects it to be four feet long and gray." She swirled the beer in the glass. "Shit," she said, looking at it, "she'd better be okay."

  The waiter appeared. It was Roberto. Everybody who worked at Monument Records seemed to eat at Nickodell's, and Rhoda had chosen it out of all the restaurants in Hollywood when I'd called to ask her to lunch. Roberto looked more than professionally concerned. "Somethin' wrong with the lady's hamburger?"

  Rhoda summoned up a sweet smile. "No," she said, "the hamburger's fine. Something's wrong with the lady."

  "You wan' Pepto-Bismol?" Roberto asked. "We always got a lot of Pepto-Bismol." He smiled sympathetically and included me in it. "Pepto-Bismol is our insurance company."

  "It's okay, Roberto." He started to leave. "Wait," I said. "Last time I was in here, the guy I was with, you remember?"

  "Terrible guy, bad-lookin' guy. Look like he wan' to eat the Easter bunny raw. I remember."

  "Did you ever see him before? Do you know his name?"

  Roberto squinted at the wall as if he expected to see a Technicolor film unspool on its surface. "Naw," he finally said. "Somebody as mean as that, I remember." He shrugged. "Sorry," he said, dismissing it. In a waiter's world there are a lot of bad guys.

  "No problem. Thanks anyway."

  "So what
was that about?" Rhoda said as Roberto vanished toward the kitchen.

  "Nothing. Another shitty business lunch."

  "Yeah. A business lunch is the shortest route between eating and the bathroom. Do not pass go. Do not taste. In fact, skip the esophagus entirely. It' supposed to punctuate the day, right? Sally said once that lunch was the only punctuation mark softer than a comma."

  "You're good friends."

  "She's a good friend. You think I'm easy to put up with? Until Herbert proposed I was five miles of barbed wire. Get married, everybody kept saying. Listen to your biological tock clicking." She picked up her beer and looked at it with one eye shut. " Tock clicking,' " she said. "Am I a cheap drunk, or what? So no wonder I was grouchy, the whole world waiting to watch me walk the plank to Lohengrin, all these damn women in Connecticut writing big fat books about the joys of late-life motherhood, and all I really want to do is go home to my dinky little apartment, feed the cat, and try to stay reasonably sober until it's time for David Letterman. Otherwise I don't get the jokes."

  She drew a long breath. "Sally let me take it all out on her. When Herbert, may he catch a fatal case of athlete's foot and die slowly from his ankles up, when Herbert proposed and I didn't know what to do, Sally listened to me for weeks and weeks. Must have seemed like years to her. One day I was yes, one day I was no. Whichever way I felt, I'd ask for advice, which Sally would dutifully give, and I'd be back the next day with the same goddamned questions. And she'd listen again and give me advice again, and then we'd do it all over."

  She picked up the beer and put it down again. "I'd like a real drink," she said. "A screwdriver, is that okay?"

  I signaled for Roberto and ordered. "What advice did she give you? Did she want you to marry Herbert or not?"

  Rhoda's laugh was short and dry. "She didn't give a shit either way. She just wanted me to do whatever would make me happy. It wouldn't have made any difference if Herbert was Bigfoot, as long as she was sure that he was what I wanted. Hell, if Bigfoot had been the boy of my dreams, she would have helped him rent a tuxedo."