Grist 04 - Incinerator (2 page)

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.

“Lieu
tenant
,” 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 Italian 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.

“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.”