Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (15 page)

“Have we got a deal?”

“How am I supposed to treat this information?”

“That’s your problem. Pretend I’m an informant, someone on the street.”

Hammond drank. Eleanor and I followed suit. “Is the information good?” he said.

“Better than anything you’ve got now.”

He waved a hand for Peppi. “Deal,” he said. “Shoot.”

I told him about how I’d been hired, about the line of bull that had been fed to me about Sally. I described Needle-nose, and he nodded. As I’d figured, he already had a description from the people who ran the motel. I shut up as Peppi served a new round, and then told him about the Church. He sat up and took notice. Hammond’s pen was scratching away, but Eleanor hadn’t yet taken a note. I told him about Rhoda Gerwitz and about Skippy Miller.

‘They got your name from Skippy,” Eleanor said.

“He said not.”

“Simeon. He told his Listener.”

I sat back and felt stupid. “You’re good at this,” Hammond said to her.

“I’ve been working at it all day,” she said, looking pleased. “He’s a good teacher. Simeon, what about the other murder?”

Hammond leaned forward. All the good feeling fled from his face. “What other murder?”

“I need to know we have a deal.”

“My ass,” he said.

“Good night.” I got up to go.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I told you. I want in, and I want information on four people. Dr. Richard Merryman of the Church of the Eternal Moment, two folks from something that calls itself the Congregation of the Present, and one other.”

“Names?”

“From the Congregation, Dr. Hubert Wilburforce and Sister Zachary.” He wrote. “Number four is a man named Ellis Fauntleroy, or possibly not, deceased. I want everything you’ve got on any of them. Nothing held back, Al.”

“Do I look like a man who’d hold something back?” Neither of us said anything, so he crossed himself. “You’ve got it,” he said. “On my mother’s grave.”

“Your mother’s alive,” Eleanor said.

“How do you know?” Hammond said, looking surprised.

“You’re not married,” Eleanor said, “and you see your mother often. It’s written all over your face.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hammond said.

“Where, specifically?” I asked, looking at Hammond’s face.

“His forehead,” Eleanor said.

“My mother notwithstanding,” Hammond said, “you’ve got a deal. What’s the other murder?”

“Friday night in Santa Monica,” I said.

“Huh?”

“The guy I mentioned, Harker or Fauntleroy.” Hammond still looked blank. “In Santa Monica,” I said again.

Hammond said nothing.

“In the TraveLodge, for Christ’s sake. How many murders
were
there in the Santa Monica TraveLodge on Friday night?”

Hammond laid down his notebook and spread two empty hands. “None,” he said.

Chapter 14

T
hat was what I got for not reading the papers. I’d been assuming all along that Harker’s death had been reported, when obviously a clean-up squad had been waiting in the wings. For whatever reason, they’d waited until I’d cleared out and then sent in the housekeepers. And for whatever reason, I told myself again, they’d left me alive.

So, we were dealing with a number of people. At least three, I figured: one to kill Harker, probably one more to help him, as Hamlet said, to lug the guts into the neighbor room—bodies are heavy—and one to go to my house and slip the cassette out of my answering machine. One or more of them had obviously been listening in when Harker called me, and Harker had probably known it but it hadn’t worried him. He’d thought he was part of the gang.

On the whole, that made me happy. The more people you have involved in a murder, the more likely it is that one of them will do something stupid.

Hollering over the music in the Red Dog, Hammond had made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, I was the stupid one. If I’d done what I was supposed to do, which is to say call the cops, they’d have a body. He’d used language that had turned Eleanor scarlet, and I’d had no choice but to listen. As we staggered out of the Red Dog and into the rain on Hollywood Boulevard, I’d asked whether our deal still stood.

Hammond didn’t seem to notice the rain. He stood there, solid and bulky, with water streaming down his face, and thought for a long wet moment.

“With a difference,” he finally said. “The information is two-way. I get everything you get.” He really wanted out of Records.

“Al,” I said, “of course. I’d assumed that all along.”

“Honey,” Hammond said to Eleanor, who was shivering at my side, “go home with Peppi. She’s a straighter guy than your buddy here.”

“He’s always been a liar,” she said. So much for loyalty.

“All of it, Simeon,” Hammond said to me. “And I mean it. Investigators’ licenses are precarious things.”

I got my legs to wobbling. “Look,” I said, “you’re making me weak in the knees.”

Hammond took Eleanor’s hand in both of his. “You’re a beautiful little thing,” he said, “and it’s been a pleasure to meet you. Good-bye, jerk,” he said to me. He turned abruptly and walked away into the rain. He hardly weaved at all.

“What a sweet man,” Eleanor said. “His mother is a very lucky woman.”

“Well, you beautiful little thing,” I said, “where to now?”

“Home. We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

We hadn’t even hit the Santa Monica freeway when the man on the radio said that there’d been a mudslide in Topanga, closing the boulevard from the Pacific Coast Highway to Old Canyon.

“Well, shit,” I said. “That’s an extra fifty miles.”

“Stay at my place,” she said absently.

“You’re kidding,” I said. Hope springs eternal.

“Why not? The couch is comfortable.”

Hope, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, is a thing with feathers, and Eleanor had just twisted its neck. For lack of anything more interesting to do, I turned the windshield wipers onto high, and they responded by swinging back and forth at exactly the same rate as before. The silence in the car lengthened in an ominous fashion. I turned right from La Brea onto the long freeway on-ramp, heading west.

“Anyway,” she finally said, “if you sleep on my couch you won’t be sleeping with that Roxy or whatever her name is.” She rapped her fingernails sharply against the window.

I swallowed a couple of times and wondered how she knew about Roxanne Then I stopped wondering. The Women’s Network, the world’s most successful subversive society, had done its stuff. “Who am I supposed to sleep with?” I said, more defensively than I would have liked. “My teddy bear wore out years ago.”

“Simeon,” she said with elaborate unconcern, “I don’t care who you sleep with, as long as you don’t catch anything. I mean, I certainly hope you don’t think I’m being possessive.”

Childishly I sped up; Eleanor hated it when I drove fast. This time, though, she seemed determined to ignore it. She chewed distractedly on the ends of her hair and gazed out the window on her side.

“I want to interview the Speaker and her mother,” she finally said, “and that Dr. Merryman you keep talking about.”

“Great,” I said. “And Happy Trails to you.”

“Are you going to come along?”

“They know me.”

“So what? They don’t know you’re a detective, do they?”

“No, but they know my name isn’t Algernon Swinburne.”

“Good thing. I was getting tired of that name anyway. I couldn’t keep calling you Algy. It sounds like something that grows in a pool.”

“This is dangerous, Eleanor,” I said for perhaps the twelfth time. “These folks kill people.”

“Why is it okay for you and not for me?” she asked with a sudden burst of energy. “Is murder something new, some passing fad? Do you think I like it when you swashbuckle around all night, like some Boy Scout fantasy, and come home with holes in your head? This is the first time since you started this stupid job that I’ve gotten a chance to see what it’s all about. So it’s dangerous. So is driving like a maniac when it’s raining. Simeon, would you please slow
down
?”

“Then you’re in this for keeps,” I said.

“Oh, come on. Stop playing Lochinvar. I don’t want to get rescued.  There’s a story here.  It could make a big difference in my life. The New Age is getting old. Are you going to slow down or not?”

I eased my foot from the accelerator. “One of the Speakers is dead,” I said. “Let’s try to locate the one who isn’t. She couldn’t be more than seventeen by now.”

“What’s her name?”

I didn’t know, and it made me feel dumb. “Get it from Chantra,” I said. “If she doesn’t have it, we’ll go downtown to that hotel the Church owns and pick up some literature. And where is Mr. Ellspeth? The current Speaker must have a father, but the Church only books mother-daughter acts.”

“Why is he important?”

“I don’t know that he is. But maybe he’s on the outside wishing he were in. If so, he could be resentful enough to talk to us.”

“Like Wilburforce,” she said.

“Like Wilburforce. Go into the morgue at the
Times
, if you can do it without having to explain what you’re doing to too many people. Can you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never looked in the morgue before. I’ve only worked for them a little while. Morgue,” she said. “What an awful word. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Anything you can find on the Church. Or on the Congregation. Look for stories on the death of a girl named Anna Klein.”

“Why and when?”

“She was the Church’s first Speaker. I don’t know when, but it had to be within the last seven or eight years. The Church is only twelve years old.”

“The one who died, right? Some kind of accident?”

“Maybe,” I said. The wipers made another slow pass. “And then again, maybe not.”

“Another one?”

“Could be.”

“Holy smoke,” Eleanor said. “She was just a little girl. Who’d want to kill a little girl? I know this sounds gruesome, Simeon, but there could be a mini-series here.”

“Sooner or later,” I said, “there could also be a man with a gun in his hand. As your friend Peppi said, this isn’t television.”

“Why do you assume it’s a man?”

“Good point,” I said grudgingly. “The Church is riddled with women.”

“That’s a pleasant way to put it. But you’re probably right. The bigwigs all seem to be men.”

“It was ever thus.”

A big-rig, a twelve-wheeler at least, howled past us on the left, throwing off sheets of water from its tires. The light in the cab was on, and I watched in fascination as the driver tossed back a couple of pills.

“Anything else?” she said.

“Yeah. Hold off on Merryman and Angel for the moment, if you don’t mind. Let’s talk to the people who don’t know me first, okay? A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it’s also the place where you’re most likely to walk into an ambush.”

“You’re so masculine,” she said. It didn’t sound like a compliment.

“Then why do I have to sleep on the couch?”

“Because it would complicate things. We’ve got days of talking to do before we sleep together again, if we ever do. Anyway, you’ve always got Roxy.”

“Roxanne,” I said. “You know her name, so why pretend to get it wrong?”

“Little heavier than you usually like them, isn’t she?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said offensively. “I’m usually on top.”

“That must be novel,” she said.

There was no way to win.

At her place, she waited for a moment for the rain to subside. When it didn’t, she opened the passenger door anyway. “You’re not coming in?”

“For what?”

“Okay,” she said. “See you tomorrow.” There was a moment of silence. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t be a lunk,” she said. “Anyway, you’ve got a long drive.” The instant she got out of the car, the rain stopped. It started again as she closed the front door behind her.

To get from Santa Monica to Topanga Canyon without going up the Pacific Coast Highway you have to track east, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, and then head north until you can pick up Topanga, turn left, and go most of the way west again. It’s a meandering, basically U-shaped route, all freeways and blue-white light at night, a charmless drive under the best of circumstances. In a downpour, it always reminds me of Shelly Berman’s famous definition of flying: hours of boredom relieved by moments of stark terror.

Between the yawns and the occasional red accident flares, I thought about Eleanor. We’d met at UCLA, where I was pursuing one of my long string of semi-useless degrees in lieu of doing anything better. She was the most wastefully beautiful human being I’d ever seen in my life, attractive way beyond the demands of natural selection. Two weeks after she moved in she had me kicking a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit that I’d thought was as permanent as a tattoo. A week later, to my infinite surprise, I was running along next to her on San Vicente Boulevard: wheezy, labored quarter-miles at first, then miles, then l0K’s, finally marathons.

In spite of the fact that she couldn’t get me to stop drinking beer, the pounds began to fall away. I’d been a shamefaced, sedentary 237 pounds when we met; six months later I weighed 175, and I was stopping to look for my reflection in store windows on Westwood Boulevard. It wasn’t vanity; I just couldn’t find myself. Until I learned to recognize my new silhouette, I’d had an eerie feeling that I was invisible on the street.

My blood pressure, which had been higher than the federal deficit, plummeted to textbook normal and stayed there. Several cups of nicotine-based goop gradually cleared from my lungs. I no longer woke up each morning to the sound of my respiratory system squeaking.

And then a cocaine-fried subhuman made a natural mistake, considering the state of his consciousness, and threw an inoffensive young woman named Jennie Chu off the top of one of the UCLA dormitories. Jennie Chu had been one of Eleanor’s closest friends, a shy math student, gymnast, and part-time classical pianist from Taiwan who had never really mastered American English and who’d had the misfortune to wear eyeglasses that resembled those worn by the woman the coke freak had really intended to kill. The doctors said she had died instantly, but, as Eleanor said at the time, “What’s instantly? It must have taken her a month to hit the ground.”

A few days later I delivered the man who killed Jennie Chu to the LAPD with both his elbows broken, and I had found a career. I had learned that I enjoyed righting wrongs. I had also learned that, under the right circumstances, I enjoyed breaking someone’s elbows. I’d been keeping tabs on the latter discovery in the two years since. I’d broken a couple of hands, hands that belonged to a man who’d come up with an interesting new use for pliers, but no elbows.

Topanga Canyon Boulevard stretched uphill in front of me, empty and wet. As empty, I thought, with several drams of self-pity, as the house I lived in, the house I’d shared with Eleanor until I’d fooled around one too many times and she’d stopped telling me it was okay and packed up and moved to Venice.

It’s so easy to break things that it seems like it should be easier to put them back together. Once, when I was a kid, I was showing one of my mother’s prize Irish crystal vases to a pretty classmate, feeding her wide-eyed awe by making up stories about the craftsmen who cut every facet by hand and died prematurely from inhaling glass. In my eagerness to get to the punch line, I dropped the vase. It broke into only three pieces, but I spent the entire afternoon sitting on the floor with a tube of glue, and the cracks were the first thing my mother saw when she got home that evening. The lesson didn’t take. I’d broken a lot of things since.

Alice sputtered resentfully when I cut the engine at the bottom of the driveway. The rain drummed giant fingers on the thin Detroit tin of Alice’s roof. It was like sitting in a big beer can.

Rain stopped for Eleanor, but I was too much of a realist to expect it to stop for me. I opened the door and hunched over, reducing the surface area vulnerable to the wet.

The smell hit me even before I got out of the car. It rolled at me out of the sagebrush, a concentration of corruption so vile that it should have been incandescent, like swamp gas. Its source, whatever it was, was dead beyond the resurrection dreams of even the most fervent born-again Christian. I forgot the rain altogether and clawed my way up the muddy driveway. At the top of the hill I realized that I’d been holding my breath and drew several shuddering breaths of clean, rainwashed air. Against my better judgment I raised my arm to my nose and sniffed my sleeve. The smell had impregnated the cloth.

Then I noticed that the kitchen light was on.

I hadn’t left it on.

One of the design quirks of the shack I rent from Mrs. Yount is that there are absolutely no windows you can look through from the outside. They’re all about eight feet above ground level. That’s charming when you want privacy, which I usually did. Now, standing in the downpour, I considered the drawbacks. The one that immediately occurred to me was sudden death.